Swamp Day with Anna!   Tuesday April 13 2010

For about a week after comps were over, I took a break from work and indulged in all of the awesome things I wanted to do, but could not, during the months of studying. I sat on my patio and read a book for FUN. (It was Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen, by the way, and like most of his books, it was excellent!) I went for long bike rides. I went to the nail salon. But best of all, I got to go to the swamp with my friend Anna!

Anna is a grad student in biology at USF, and she studies salamander DNA. Every day, she gets to travel to Green Swamp, about an hour from campus, where she has set up salamander traps in the water. If the traps have caught any salamanders, she will cut a bit of their tails off to use as DNA samples. She usually takes along an assistant, and lucky for me, this assistant does not necessarily need to have any knowledge of science at all, nor do they have to be willing to touch any actual salamanders–they just have to be willing to put on some waders and slog around in the swamp! I have wanted to serve as swamp assistant ever since I found out that I met these stringent qualifications.

As my serious love of Carl Hiaasen books might indicate, I am a native Floridian and I totally love my state. Florida on the surface appears to be mostly a land of Disney World, gated subdivisions, people from New York, and corrupt politicians, and that aspect of it is growing bigger and bigger all the time. But we also have one of the most unique and diverse histories of any state, and there’s tons of sweet nature that hasn’t yet been filled with tract houses and strip malls. It’s not especially easy to find these days, but hunting down “Real Florida” is one of my hobbies. Swamp exploration is, I think, the ultimate Real Florida activity, and I will admit that I was completely unreasonably excited about it.

So, I met up with Anna on campus and we made the long drive to the swamp. Along the way, Anna, who I learned has eagle-like eyes when it comes to spotting creatures, saw a little snake in the road, so we stopped to look at it.

We (note: in this post, when I say “we” I mean “Anna”) put it in a bucket so that we could figure out what kind of snake it was.

It turned out he was a garter snake, thanks to many faint characteristics that I, unaccustomed to looking for snake characteristics, would never have seen even with the aid of a book. Having identified him, we set him free and proceeded on to the swamp!

This is one of the areas where Anna has set up salamander traps. The white posts you can see in the picture above are where the traps are–you can sort of see the black things at the top of the water: those are the traps.

Anna checked each trap to see if there were any salamanders inside. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any on this day, so I didn’t get to observe the tail-snipping sample-taking process, which was a bummer. But inside the traps, we did find water beetles, a small water snake, a couple spiders, and tons and tons of crayfish.

We also saw the biggest tadpole I have ever seen, but Anna tells me that this is actually a pretty small tadpole, as tadpoles go:

Sometimes I helped move some traps around, but mainly, my job was to walk around and look at stuff, which I did quite happily.

I think that my alternate purpose was to make it so that if a large alligator came and ate Anna, her body would not be lost forever in the swamp. Or at least, she would have someone to gruesomely die with. But those services were not needed, so mostly I just walked around. I also provided valuable assistance in bucket-holding and questions-asking.

So, all in all, it was a pretty great day! I’m really glad I went!