On a drizzly December afternoon in western Massachusetts, U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologists Evan Grant and Adrianne Brand stop their car on the side of the road and plod into the wet forest through a break in the oaks and white pines. It’s a bit late in the year to find the predators they’re searching for, but this forest is teeming with them. In fact, as soon as they walk past the first tree, they’re probably never more than a few feet from a salamander.
You’d never know it, though.
If you walk into almost any forest, like this one in the northeastern United States, and stand still, you’ll start to hear animals. At first, the songs of birds from afar will reach you. Then, the ones nearby that went silent at your approach will start back up. After a while, you might hear some rustling in the leaves nearby: chipmunks, squirrels or other small mammals, and maybe a snake or two. But as long as you stand, and as silent as you may be, what you’ll never hear — and probably never see — are these predators, the most common terrestrial vertebrates in the woods.
Fortunately, unless you’re a small bug, you’re not in any danger. The ubiquitous critters are eastern red-backed salamanders: skinny, lungless amphibians a couple of inches long with a rust-colored racing stripe down their backs. And in forests from Nova Scotia to Minnesota and down south to North Carolina, there are often more Plethodon cinereus than any other land animal with a backbone. Their sheer weight is greater than all the nearby birds and small mammals combined. From the East Coast to the West, those tremendous numbers are showing scientists just how important salamanders are to the forests that surround them.
