 Actually, I'm going to get the presenter view out here real quick and get you into the right view. There we go. Okay, cool. Well, thank you everyone for having me here today and sorry for the slightly delayed start with me here I have my four year old daughter as well Audrey and I apologize for the cough background noise they can hear from her she's going through a cold at the moment that I recently beat but she is currently at the tail end up. She is almost five. Okay, so today I'm going to be talking to you about my nonprofit main big night and about the work that kind of brought me to becoming the creator of main big night and I'm actually going to start all of us off where I started about 20 years ago and hopefully the sound will work here. Should be hearing some frogs in a second. We had it working a minute ago. Alright, well I guess unfortunately you won't be able to hear the frogs that I had in the background here but imagine the best sound that we all hear in the springtime right which is that of peepers and also would frogs which do we all know what would frogs sound like. A couple nods and a couple head shakes okay so what frogs they sound like. I guess I'd call them like chickens in the woods or perhaps duck like they kind of like quack they kind of like. And that would have been the audio that you would have been hearing now and that sound is what actually formed the backdrop for my first main big night experience. Coming home from an outing it was in the middle of April it was rainy and it was a little bit warm out we're talking about 40 to 45 degrees at night. And we pull into our driveway and as we walk up to our door, there was a shadowy figure of a creature there in my driveway, and it was none other than a spotted salamander. Spotted salamanders are a fantastic creature and for a seven year old kid who already knew he wanted to be a wildlife biologist. This was like the spark creature for him. But if you're anything like me you were rolling logs and flipping rocks looking for species like this all the time as a kid, and I had never seen one of these yet. I had seen plenty of redback salamanders and plenty of Easter newts, but I had never seen a spotted salamander before. And that's because they actually spend most of their lives far underground, not just, you know, under a rock or log but usually well underground and not available to be seen so this was a really exciting thing for me to see I mean this is a salamander three inches long, all black with these bright yellow spots and this happened to be a female that was on her way to a special habitat that I'll talk about in just a second. But just to introduce you to just how incredible this species is. This is the only photosynthetic vertebrate on the planet. And if you're not familiar with what that actually means, basically, these guys can take sunlight and turn it into food energy like a plant can. This is the only species with a backbone that can do that, which is a fantastic superpower but unfortunately, the adults and the species never get to use that superpower because again, they live underground and they only come above ground at high time. So they're not getting that sunlight, but when they're juveniles and they're living in their ponds they can actually turn sunlight into energy. And this female, she was on her way to a place that looks like this. This is a vernal pool and vernal pools are a significant wildlife habitat type in Maine, which is pretty amazing given the fact that they're basically just puddles. They can hold water for a couple of months at a time and then usually by the end of summer they lose all the water and dry out. And it's that fact that makes them so special they can't hold fish life because they dry out. They can't hold frogs and they become in that way a safe haven for things like spotted salamanders where they can actually lay their eggs, let their babies grow and not be eaten by things like fish or bullfrogs. So there's that and then there's also the fact that there are some species that can only be found in vernal pools. So for example, fairy shrimp. They are a species that actually a couple of species that we have here in Maine. That will only be found in vernal pools and they'll lay their eggs in the soil leaf litter and those eggs could actually be hundreds of years old so if you have a vernal pool on your property with fairy shrimp. Those fairy shrimp might have been laid in the soil before Europeans even made it to the continent. Pretty amazing group of animals. Oh, let me make sure I probably forgot to share my screen again. That's right. Can everybody on zoom see that now. Yeah, that's mother. Okay. Yes. In addition to the fairy shrimp there's also plant species that are only found in vernal pools as well so vernal pools are these biodiversity hotspots in Maine that do get special protections. Because of the status that they have and if you look into a vernal pool at the right time, you might see quite the activity going on where you'll see this kind of ballroom blitz, I guess, the spotted salamanders kind of ride them all over each other swimming around like little crocodiles. The males will arrive a little early and deposit sperm packets and the females will show up later and pick up those firm packets and lay their eggs. And sure enough, after about a week or so of salamanders being present you should see some eggs like this. And both of these by the way are spotted salamander egg masses they just sometimes take on a different color appearance. Right here. I guess my mouse doesn't show up here but for those on zoom hopefully you can see my mouse circling this bug. And for those in the room. So changing on zoom. Hmm. See if I can figure out how to fix that. So people on zoom right now. What picture are they seeing. Okay. You're not seeing that. Okay. Try to duplicate and see if that works. Perfect. Okay. Hopefully that maintains and actually I'm going to advance the next slide here and see if that works. You see the next picture there. All right. All right, cool. We're on it. So if you look at one of these egg masses here. I'll get my mouse out of the way to actually see a little dragonfly larvae starting to eat some of these eggs. So not only do we have a start of the spotted salamander cycle going on. We have other species already starting to depend on these animals that these egg packets are like little protein packets for all sorts of things, including dragonflies. Okay. So it didn't take long for me to realize that you go out on a big night and or rather on a warm rainy night in spring. You can find amphibians in your driveway or on the road. So, you know, we go out and warm rainy night, you find some salamanders and perhaps you might find some frogs like this guy here. This is a wood frog and people often refer to them as like the Clark Kent of the amphibian world. And that's because or actually not even the Clark Kent's the Captain Americas of the amphibian world because they can actually freeze almost entirely solid. And their heart will stop beating their brain activity will cease, they'll be essentially dead, but then come springtime they'll thaw back out and then just wake up and carry on like things are normal. Amazing animal, very unsuspecting little guy as well, given all that and then they just end up in our wetlands plucking like little chickens and they go back into the woodlands for the summer and then they freeze again and they repeat it all over. And also on these nights too I encountered plenty of these guys which are spring peepers and while they do look large on the screen here they're only about the size of your fingernail. And that's pretty remarkable, given how loud they can actually be they are our smallest frog but certainly our loudest. I'm sure a couple of us here and hopefully a lot of us have been around wetland where peepers are so loud that your ears were actually in some level of pain, which you know it's it's a pain that you kind of love I think I don't get to experience that enough these days but peepers tend to be the most common thing I encountered while I was out there look looking. But you know once you get a night where you find some spotted salamanders you find some wood frogs you find some peepers, maybe you find a couple other species mattered in there, all of these things moving at the same time you get what's called a big night. So a big night is a night where things just come together, and they have all sorts of amphibians moving at the same time. And there's a reason that they all move at the same time and it's because amphibians are very sensitive to the environment around them. And these are not warm blooded right they can't make their own body heat. They are essentially fish that learns to live on land they require water in order to be on land otherwise they can dry out very quickly. So a big night happens because a few things come together to allow amphibians to be out and moving and thriving in this on land. Well, it needs to be springtime because that's when a lot of these amphibians are going to be breeding and for Maine our big nights typically fall in mid April. But I will say in recent years it's been following, follow, excuse me falling a little bit earlier, probably like the first or second week of April, although this year given how early spring has been. I'm willing to bet that it's probably going to be the last week of March that we'll see some of our biggest movements. The ground does need to be thought and that's because a lot of amphibians they require, or rather they are spending their winter in the soil so if it's still frozen they can't escape it. Plus it takes a lot of energy to heat up the ground enough so it's kind of like a failsafe where like, sometimes we get these warm spells right in the middle of January, February, and a salamander might come out if it's not very deep enough in the middle of April and it might think oh it's like 50 or 60 degrees out it's probably time for me to start moving but it's February right so it's not really going to be a safe time for an amphibian to move there's going to be a cold snap in like two days. But if the ground is thawed, that's almost a surefire sign that we're actually pretty far into springtime and it's safe to merge. Again, these are essentially fish that learn to live on land, so it needs to be wet and rain is kind of like a siren call for amphibians. It doesn't need to be raining hard, it just needs to be enough to make the ground wet. And then it needs to be a temperature of around 45 degrees Fahrenheit and again amphibians they can't make their own body temperature so they have to rely on the environment around them. And as it turns out somewhere between about 40 and 50 degrees is what really kicks off the movements for amphibians. So if all of these things come together, then you can have a night that looks kind of like this and this is a picture from one of our volunteers. There's actually three species of amphibians in this picture but most of them are wood frogs. There's also spotted salamanders as well as blue spotted salamanders but it can be a heck of a big night if you get all these conditions at the right time. And just to give you some context for how incredible these migrations are. If we correct an amphibians distance that it migrates by how much it weighs. Amphibian migrations are equivalent to that of woodland caribou migrations which are traveling 400 miles. So these amphibians are essentially traveling 400 amphibian miles. They're actually 13 times longer than the wildebeest migrations in the Serengeti and that's perhaps one of the most famous migration events of all time. If you watched any wildlife documentary, you've probably seen those scenes of wildebeest like jumping across these rivers and getting eaten by crocodiles and then dodging lions on the other side. This is 13 times greater than that one. So this is happening in our backyards and just putting it in a more human context I guess most of these guys are only migrating about a kilometer or less so it's about 1,000 feet or no. I forget how many feet like 3,000. Oh yes 3,000 feet. Perfect. I put it on the slide. That's far for us that's something that you can walk in a matter of a couple of minutes but for something that is, you know, three inches long that's quite a trek to make. And it's a lot of fun to be out there tracking these amphibians as they make their way across the landscape and certainly roads are one of the best ways to find these guys they're relatively exposed and easy to find. And it did not take long for young me to find that amphibians were facing a pretty big problem as they started crossing these roads, because a lot of them ended up like this guy here. Unfortunately, a lot of amphibians are hit as they cross roads. But some people have asked me are roads really that much of an issue for amphibians and that's something that I want to walk through with all of you so they understand where amphibians do follow this because not all species are impacted by roads equally. If we take white tail deer for an example. White tail deer are hit by cars all the time. You know you see dead deer on the side of the highway relatively frequently, but relatively speaking there's been no noticeable population decline in white tail deer due to roads in fact, this is surprising even given the fact that they are breeding more slowly than amphibians. White tail deer female might produce one, maybe two fawns in a season whereas a female salamander might produce, you know, 300 eggs in a spring so surprising given that they're breeding so slowly by comparison, also considered the fact to that deer roadside habitats are actually excellent for deer. Good for grazing, and they're pretty much predator free, a lot of coyotes or anything else that might be going after your deer tends to be fairly shy around roadside. So dear have it made when it comes to roads. But unfortunately amphibians have it a lot worse and why that is I'm going to dive in into with you but to start thinking about it. I want you all to think how many deer have you hit before and odds are you can probably think of exactly the correct number of deer you've hit because you know it when you hit a deer right, you know, banks of your car hopefully doesn't hurt you but you know it when it happens. But how many frogs and salamanders have you hit before. Oops, I don't know, because you just can't see it you don't feel it it doesn't harm your car. So it's possible that you can be running over hundreds or possibly even thousands of amphibians in your lifetime. Now I want to walk through a few road ecology basics with you to further illustrate why roads are an issue for amphibians. The first one being that animals all respond to roads differently and I spoke a little bit already about this but some animals avoid roads, typically your predators. If a car is coming it typically just go the other way and they will only cross the road when there's essentially no traffic so that will be things like bears and mountain lions. Some species will travel across roads quickly when a car is coming so if a deer is coming up to a road and it sees a car coming. Sometimes it might, you know, double back and go back into the woods and wait but frequently they'll just run across the road as fast as they can that tends to be the response. Some will freeze in response to roads where if a car is coming they'll just freeze on the side or unfortunately as we see frequently with squirrels they freeze in the middle of the road that tends to be a lot of our small mammals. But then there's a group that is essentially oblivious to traffic they're unable to assess cars as a threat and that unfortunately is our amphibians. Even if you are in rush hour traffic, an amphibian will still attempt to cross. It has no idea what it's getting itself into. Wow. Now consider that to the fact that roads are everywhere. And when I mean everywhere I'm talking about an entire fifth of the planet is affected by roads. Well only 1% of the Earth's surface is covered by asphalt. A full 20% is actually affected by the road directly we have what's called a road effect zone. Basically pollutants, sound habitat changes all happen when a road is put in place. And when you think about roads to bisecting all these habitats, you get these wildlife that need to cross all these roads at these different points and looking especially at the northeast how much a deer or salamander might need to be crossing a road. You get a lot of wildlife collisions and unfortunately that's costing American taxpayers about $8 billion per year. And that's going to come back again later I'll talk about why that's important and I know that amphibians are not damaging anyone's cars but we can talk about amphibians with other wildlife in a different context. Another road ecology point is that roads are also unfair predators. Natural predators tend to take out things that are either sick or dying or elderly roads will take out anything that's on the road. Unfortunately that reduces the overall population health of a lot of species that are being impacted by roads. And we can even see this in how some of these animals are breeding. So, for example, spotted salamanders again. The populations that live closer to roads tend to lay less eggs and their eggs tend to be smaller. That's because the healthy females are the ones that are getting hit. And it's the less healthy ones that are remaining to breed. I know that you're already two but roads are a very noisy thing to have in the environment. Tire noise is actually a lot louder than a motor noise and tire noise can carry for potentially miles in the correct circumstances. And consider to where frogs need to be able to hear each other when they breed so if you have a really busy highway or even a state route. Sometimes frogs are unable to hear each other when they're trying to breed and so breeding is not able to occur in some instances. So if you are right next to a loud noisy thing, you might not be in the best state of mind, I guess you could say, this is true of humans to humans that live next to a noisy road they tend to have a life expect, expectancy that's reduced by up to three years. So when we're talking about a frog that's used to something that's supposed to be entirely quiet around them, they're pretty stressed, and even their immune systems are being compromised by being too close to roads and being stressed by noise around them. So that's coming together to impact amphibians about roads, but perhaps one of the most damaging things is that roads are almost these impassable barriers at times. Yes, some of them do cross successfully but if you think about a road that has high traffic. That might as well be a fast flowing river or an impassable mountain range. It's causing populations to be separated and unable to reach each other to breed unable to access the resources that are on either side, and we get what we kind of call an extinction vortex starting to form. So first of all, we have a group that is separated. It has less access to resources. They can't read with others and gain that genetic information that kind of keeps them going. Population size and isolation can eventually lead to inbreeding. And then habitat is reduced in quality as well. So we have what's called the edge effects when we're talking about habitat where when you put a road in place somewhere. The, let's say you cut through like a perfect, like old grove forest. The interior of that forest is now exposed to sunlight, more heat, moisture gets reduced. And then species that would not occur in the interior of that forest can now actually thrive there. And the pathology of some of these habitats are getting changed. So all this comes together and creates what we call this extinction vortex where essentially amphibians get left with this suite of problems that build off each other, and they're unable to fight it and they end up kind of going down this rabbit hole of not being able to escape and we end up with populations that disappear, they get choked out by roads. To drive this home, this is something that is happening in Maine, even though we have relatively low traffic and certainly relatively low road coverage. It does not take much to cause this. A rural. Diane Zavatsky is not as damaging as a highway. But just to actually family medicine. Diane Zavatsky. For everybody. So folks at the University of Maine or where I'm at. I don't know when I did a genetic study on wood frogs and spotted salamanders. And they'd found that either of those amphibians on either side of I 95 are genetically distinct from each other. And that highway has only been there for 60 years and we're seeing a population response that we would only expect over the course of hundreds, maybe thousands of years in a natural system. So there's a lot of pressure coming from these highways and this is also something that we can see, like I said in more rural roads as well. They didn't specifically list like a certain road or something where there was a distinction on either side, but they had found evidence to say that even on rural roads on either side, you can see some genetic differentiation. And this is also really important too because it doesn't take much to drive an amphibian population to extinction from roads so you only need to take out one out of every 10 spotted salamanders over the course of a course of a few years to drive it to extinction within 20 years, basically. It's kind of a confusing mathematics thing it's called a population viability analysis but if one out of every 10 spotted salamanders is killed on the road every year, that population will disappear in about 25 years. And I am going to forewarn that most of our roads that I've assessed are about double that mortality rate. So a lot of our amphibians might not be in a very good posture at the moment. And just to wrap up some important amphibian road stats here while I keep drilling like the road ecology things. There was a study out of Canada that studied this stretch of road in, I think it was one of the national parks, I forget which one might have been banned. But there were 30,000 amphibians that were found killed over the course of four years there. And somebody might ask like okay is that a large proportion of that population. And it is, and not only that but it's also primarily juveniles that are being hit and juveniles are the ones that drive amphibian populations to thrive. If you take out juveniles every year, that population will crash quickly. They actually carry more weight in the population than adults. And this is this fact here is true of Maine, as well as most other areas but an amphibian will face about a one in five chance of being hit by a car every time it crosses a road. So a 21% mortality rate is another way of saying that. But some roads can approach about a 100% chance of mortality. So anytime an amphibian tries to cross that road, it will be hit. Those are roads with high traffic and typically multi lane. And this was a fact that I had shown on the tissue kid. Do you know where the bathroom is? Let's see. Do we have tissues in the house here somewhere? And while we get the tissues out, I'll just hit this factory real quick. So killing 10% of adults per year will cause a population to disappear in about 25 years. This is a stat that's built off of spotted salamanders but could also potentially be true for wood frogs. It's likely that wood frogs will last a little bit longer because they can breed a little bit more. Thank you so much for the tissues. So I've told you that big nights in amphibians, they're getting impacted pretty heavily. So why do we care? A lot of people have difficulty caring about amphibians because, you know, again, if you hit an amphibian with your car it's not destroying your car you don't have to go to a mechanic. If you hit an amphibian, it's not like you saw that amphibian before and now you're missing something from your property that you miss a lot. So we're here to get people to care about something that has a face that looks like that as well. So just to kind of hammer this home. And by the way, I think that's adorable. I hope most of us here agree but perhaps not all of us. So to hammer home why this is important not only to us but to the entire ecosystem. So all amphibians are ecological indicators and this is probably something most of us have heard at one point or another where frogs and salamanders they're the cannery in the coal mine when something is wrong in the environment. They can absorb basically everything through their skin so if there's a pollutant out there they're absorbing it and they might be growing a third leg they might be dying. And actually we're going to talk about pollutants here again in a little bit. This is another thing that most people already recognized by the amphibians but I got to make sure I hit it anyway. Infibians are one of the primary predators of insects out there. In fact, the favorite snack of a young spotted salamander is mosquito larvae. They are cleaning out mosquitoes for us in the springtime. And one can only imagine how much worse mosquitoes would be without our amphibians. This is a cool and I got a cool story about this but there are food source for many predators they're pretty much the chicken McNuggets of the forest they're the small little protein packets that are walking around in the woods. And especially during big nights they're particularly exposed and a lot of species might be feasting on them. And this is my cool story actually just talked with the raptor biologist from my F and W I was sitting next to her in a horse the other day and she told me that somebody had turned in a barred owl that got hit on a road. And they opened up the crop C and they opened up the crop to see what was being eaten by this barred owl, and that crop was primarily filled with amphibians. It was spring peepers and eastern redback salamanders, and we have barely had any amphibians moving already but barred owls are on it. They know when things are moving and certainly one of the best times that I have ever seen barred owls are during big nights. I hear them call frequently during big nights I see them somewhat frequently on the roads during big nights as well chasing down frogs and salamanders. But owls aren't the only things that are eating these things there's bears coyotes foxes skunks raccoons. Fishers make it basically if it eats meat it will eat a frog or salamander. It's a little bit out of my realm but something that definitely demands thinking so amphibians. If you were to take all the amphibians in a forest and put them on one side of a scale and then put all the other things with a backbone on the other side of the scales of birds and mammals. Amphibians would outweigh all those birds and mammals and I'm talking including bear moose deer and everything on that side of the scale amphibians would still outweigh them. So if you think about moving all of these amphibians from the forest to a vernal pool or some sort of migration occurring. Think about how that might be changing the environments that they're in. You might be seeing changes in nutrient flow you might be seeing changes in energy flow. Things that we haven't really started wrapping our fingers around yet and like these are things that we know happen with bird migrations right like bird migrations are massive. They move a whole lot of energy from point A to point B and they bring all sorts of new nutrients to places when they start defecating amphibians probably doing the same thing but nobody has really quantified this yet. And in that same vein amphibians are actually one of the best climate change fighters that we have out there. Because again amphibians eat insects and a lot of insects eat leaves and wood. And when they do that they're keeping the carbon from those leaves and would circulating above the surface of the earth. And when amphibians eat those insects, they allow that stuff to sink below the earth's surface into the soil and get locks beneath the soil instead of keeping it circulating above. So they're pulling carbon out of essentially what's the atmosphere and sinking it below into the soil. I forget what the stat is it's like one salamander can sequester something like 70 pounds of carbon per. I forget how many square feet of forest but it's a fair amount because of how many insects that they're actually eating in these areas. So a lot of things are depending on amphibians and a lot of things are depending on this big night to go off without a hitch. So you can get big nights where it's a boom year or bust year depending on how things go. Now we can go about helping amphibians there's a few different ways. But basically it comes down to this model that I like a lot because it rhymes but it's the collect, protect and connect model. And it's a simple three step model. This is essentially how all wildlife conservation stuff works, but we start with a collection phase which is something that we'll talk about here in just a second. But we collect data about where these migrations are happening and where conservation needs to occur. Then based on that data we can create areas that are protected and luckily in Maine we have laws that protect certain vernal pools. Many significant vernal pool program where basically if a vernal pool meets certain conditions that can get certain protections. Basically if somebody wants to develop close to that pool or on top of it they have to get the okay from the Department of Environmental Protection. Basically it's just like a couple extra things to help make sure those pools don't get destroyed. But natural areas are only worth so much unless they're connected because essentially these are islands right they're surrounded by roads and things can't reach each other things can't migrate you can't get genetic flow you can't get nutrient flow. You can't access certain resources on either side of the road. So it's important that we connect these things and actually this is becoming even more important now as our climate is changing a little bit and species need to be able to adapt to the environment around them. If things aren't so good on this side of the road it might be better on that side of the road so maybe there's more moisture or temperatures are better on the other side of the road. But being able to connect these two patches of habitat or any number of patches is essential to ensure a long term persistence of amphibians and essentially any other species that are being impacted by roads. And by the way to that tunnel right here. I recognize it's a little bit hard to see because of the color being bleached out of it but this is one of the first tunnels built for salamanders in the United States. Hey Audrey. That's not a safe thing to do. That might fall over. Can you come back and sit in your chair? You can't sit there because that's a couch that's flipped upside down. Yeah, can you come back and sit? So this is one of the first stalls of its kind in the United States. It was built I believe in the 80s or 90s and it's in Amherst, Massachusetts. And it's a simple design but it's been very effective and it's allowed us to learn a lot about how these crossing structures will work. Basically we have these big walls on either side of the tunnel that will help guide amphibians to the entrance of the tunnel. And then notice too that there's slots on the top of the tunnel and that's really important because amphibians need to be able to get moisture in there. Without those slots those tunnels tend to dry out and things tend to build up in there. Amphibians won't use it. But they are able to access that tunnel and get through the tunnel crossing the road safely without being hit by cars and that's been a fairly successful project for real. So I'm going to talk to you about the collection part of this because this is something that you can all get involved in. This is Maine Big Nights. Or I abbreviate it MVN because it's a mouthful otherwise but Maine Big Nights is a community science project that anybody can participate in. Basically you go out, you survey for amphibians with your friends and family and as you survey you get to help them cross the road safely. And then in turn we'll take that data and try to apply it to the long-term conservation of these species. So I'm going to walk you through how this project works a little bit. First of all talking to you about the goals of the project. Number one, being identifying the significant and vulnerable amphibian migration routes around the state. Number two, we want to provide direct relief of road mortality on amphibians which that's a fancy way of saying we just want to scoot them across the road safely. Number three, this is something that we don't want to overlook but we want to provide an opportunity for members to participate in conservation and natural resource sciences. Luckily, there's been a lot of pushes to get all sorts of these other backgrounds of people involved in the natural resource sciences. But certainly the opportunities that have existed are becoming less and less used. So for example, hunting and fishing. Both of those have been declining in membership over the past few decades and we're trying to find new ways to get people involved in wildlife science. And this is a way to involve people in a group of animals that have essentially not had people recreationally interacting with them before. So how this project works, we first of all identify the sites that need to be surveyed and then we train up and certify volunteers. It's a very simple training process. Volunteers adopt the sites that they want to survey and then you go and collect and report your data. It's a pretty simple strategy. It's essentially how all other community science projects work. The training is also relatively straightforward and it's self guided. Basically, you take a short online training. It's depending how fast you read it could be 20 minutes or it could be around two hours. We just have this like online handbook basically. Then you take an online training quiz you can take any amount of times. You can take it open notes as well. Then you sign a liability waiver basically saying if you get hit by a car yourself, you're not going to sue me please don't. And then you adopt the sites that you want to survey yourself. We do require for safety purposes all volunteers to have high visibility flat vests and flashlights. And on that note about the required equipment, we recognize that it's kind of hard to get some of that gear, especially if you go to Walmart and you see that a high visibility vest is for some reason like 30 bucks at Walmart. And they're so expensive there but you can buy them on Amazon for like five bucks a piece but you know let's say if you can't access the gear that you need to participate. Community science is something that should be accessible to everybody and this is something that we take to heart. So we actually put together these main big night participation kits, and we deliver them to areas around the state and included in those kits by the way are the ID cards. These are life size watercolor drawings by Mike Boardman, perhaps some of you know Mike Boardman and his company coyotes but they are also waterproof. So, if you're out on a big night these are going to be disintegrating in front of you. There's also a nice little measuring ruler on the bottom there so you can measure whatever you're finding but these are the kits and then we also have high visibility best clipboards, headlamps, data sheets, anything that you would need to participate in main big night you can check these out for free. And we do have places around me that you can check these out for free including here at humane Farmington. I actually added a few more prices since I made this map I think we're up to let's see 123456789 we've added I think three since I made this map. So hopefully no matter where you are surveying we can get you some free equipment and I am still trying to get something up in the county and trying to fill in central Maine a little bit more as well but if you are hopefully you can get that equipment for free. All we ask is that you just return it by the end of the season so that other people can use it in following seasons or perhaps you can reuse it. And speaking of sites to we have over 500 sites around the states. All these little yellow dots are where we have sites and you probably noticed that sites tend to land where people are, and that's for two reasons. Because where development happens and people survey for vernal pools and they report where these vernal pools are. That's how we find most of our sites but also volunteers tend to report sites. Whenever they're out driving like oh I saw a bunch of salamanders at this site and they'll tell us where they saw that and we'll register that site. And I'll show you soon how many of those we've actually surveyed. So the average big night you might be let's say you're certified you're ready to go you're watching the weather and you get trained up you're ready to rock and then you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and then maybe tonight, but then you wait you get a lot of false calls, but then the nighttime temp, it might land at about 45 degrees and might start raining right at the right time. The ice and snow has been gone for a week or two now. So as you drive up and get out to your sites, you might end up with a night that looks like this, where you're just crawling with amphibians, they're coming so quickly that you can't even record data accurately. Sometimes you could be moving, you know, maybe five amphibians in a night sometimes you can be moving 12 sometimes you can be moving 50. The most I've moved in a night was 180. I think two hours at a site in unity. But some people have actually moved more than that. I think there was one site that moved I think 230 last year. So you can have these really explosive big nights and most of those tend to be peepers by the way, but you do get quite a few of the others. So when you have so many amphibians moving and volunteers out there. Fortunately, you are making a real difference for these amphibians. Again, you can be moving hundreds of these guys and you can have a real conservation impact. So for example, there was a really cool study out of Monmouth University, a guy did some modeling in 2019 where he found that volunteers helping amphibians crossroads can actually help them persist in that area for decades, decades longer than if they weren't there. So we are making a real impact by being out there. And what's also interesting too about that study is they found the most efficient thing you can do is go out and pairs. If you get more than two people out of sight you tend to become a little bit less efficient. So having about two people out of sight means that you're getting the most amphibians per person kind of thing. In case anybody wanted a little bit more of that statistical information, but I'm going to share with you a few of the results of our project to date so far because we've accomplished a lot. Some numerical total so far, we've had 22,000 or close to 22,000 amphibians recorded so far. And by the way, this is since 2018 when we started. We have surveyed for over 5000 hours which lands to be about 224 straight days. We have surveyed 349 unique sites around the state, including all the way up there and I believe that's Fort Kent. But of course we're mostly concentrated to where the people are in Maine. I don't know if anybody knows people that happen to be like up in Somerset and Piscata quiz but I'm trying to get more surveys done there. There's not a whole lot in this gap in Washington County but if anybody is able to survey that patch to that would also be very informative for us. We're estimating in this is a hard estimate here because of how the dynamics work but we're estimating that several thousand people have participated in the project. Because we've had, I believe, just under 500 people get certified, but most people bring at least one other person with them. You don't have to be certified to participate as long as you're out there with a certified person so, for example, I can get certified and I can bring my kiddo out there with me, she doesn't need to be certified. So people will bring their entire class out we've had middle school classes we've had high school classes college classes. Sometimes people organize entire social events around going out on big night so it could be two or 3000 people so far have participated in this project. So how are amphibians doing in Maine, what is the pulse on them. We're looking at a mortality rate of about 26%. So a little bit more than one in five in fact a little bit more than one and four amphibians are being hit by cars as they cross. And then this map to this is something that's really interesting to me I love looking at spatial information. So these are all the sites that have been surveyed so far. The size of the circle indicates how many amphibians are being found at these sites, but the color indicates how many are being killed. The darker red a circle is the more there are that are being killed, and we can pick out a few really cool trends. So first of all, notice how many of the dots in southern Maine are really small. There's a few large ones here that kind of block it out, but southern Maine is primarily these small dots so not in large and big population. But the circles also tend to be relatively dark colored so there's a lot more amphibians being killed in these areas in southern Maine, or there's a lot more roads and a lot more traffic. Same by the way for Bangor, we have a lot of mortality going on there. But we also have these little patches here and there where amphibians seem to be doing fairly well so out this way. We have some amphibians that have relatively large population sizes with relatively low mortality rates, which is great. Same with getting to Hancock County so towards like Acadia National Park things seem to be relatively well off. But again, it's the places that are urbanized with high traffic levels that we see populations being potentially smaller and mortality rates being potentially higher. Another cool thing we published a paper a couple years ago about how the pandemic affected amphibians because when everything shut down and I think it was March of 2020. People stopped driving right there were a lot less cars on the road. And as it turns out there are about half as many amphibians killed that there were just a lot less people out to drive and hit these amphibians so we had the perfect natural experiment in front of us. And by the way, this finding has been highlighted from the project more than anything else we've ended up in I think three children's books, one novel and untold number of online news articles but this, this has been pretty captivating to people like us to think about where if you just don't drive on these nights it can actually make a pretty profound impact so if it happens to be a warm rainy night and spring it seems like a real big thing you can do is just not drive. I do get the question a lot of whether or not there will be more amphibians as a result of that and that's something that can actually start figuring out this year because amphibians have bred the population, their population would theoretically be increasing this year after the pandemic but the odds are that things probably won't increase because traffic resumed to actually above normal levels by the summer so when all the babies had to leave the pools and go to the forest themselves, they're facing a lot more traffic than what they're normally would be. An interesting thing we pulled from that paper by the way, frogs get hit more when it's warmer and wetter but salamanders don't. We don't know why we have no theories why we can't figure it out but just a cool finding we like to share. We've also picked out a few problems that are relatively new. These are a spring peeper and a wood frog that are affected by road salt, they're suffering from edema basically their kidneys are not functioning properly. They're loading up with water and they're not able to excrete it. So when we used to find amphibians that looked like this, we would actually be excited we think that these were females loaded up with eggs that were about to have a ton of babies but as it turns out these are diseased animals. And this was something that was only described for the first time in 2019, and we're just starting to figure out where this issue occurs in Maine. A few places that we've seen this happen the most are Camden and Gray, and I believe Falmouth as well so these places that tend to be on the fringes of larger urban areas, but where a lot of road salting still occurs. And speaking of road salt to another thing that's affecting our amphibians is I forget the name of this chemical but it helps keep the dust on dirt roads down and from like flying up into the air. And we're starting to think that that is also affecting amphibians as well so I don't know if y'all remember but last spring was a really dry spring. We only had a few actual rain events, and usually that rain flushes those chemicals off the road. Because it was so dry amphibians were just itching to move late into the season, and they moved when chemicals were still very present on the road. And unfortunately we had several instances of spotted salamanders dying, just in mass with no explainable reason until we dove into this a little bit more but no explainable reason. Why would find spotted salamanders dead by the dozen on these roads and if you're looking at this picture here of the road, those aren't leaves or pine cones on the road those are all dead spotted salamanders. It's a road in bass. And then that individual there is an individual that we think is probably suffering from the same exposure. It's got this like kind of milky liquid coming from its mouth. We're not. This is something that we're still like learning to diagnose and look at ourselves. We don't even know that it's this chemical I mean that's, this is kind of a theory that we're working on but it's the best one that we can come to so far. So we've picked this up in a couple areas and hopefully it's not going to be an issue this year given how much more rain we've had. So, with all this data, we're hoping to bring together this ultimate form of conservation for these guys which would be these tunnels that go under the roads. And basically our main goal is to identify priority sites for these because we can't put a tunnel everywhere where amphibians are crossing. They cost anywhere from about $50,000 to you know $50 million depending on how big of a tunnel you're looking at. So we need to be careful about where we put these tunnels and how we design them. So we need to be careful about designing or deciding where these tunnels go. We've got a few sites around the state and I'm going to move this bar here so that you can hopefully see all of them. So we've got a few sites around the state that seem like they're particularly deserving. And I'm going to like walk through the top I believe five sites with the highest mortality. So first of all we have Boyd's corner road in South Burwick where six out of 10 amphibians are killed, it's a 60% mortality rate. From road in Brunswick, about a 64% mortality rates. Center road in Gray, 65%. Thorndike road in Unity, 70%. And then Forest Avenue and Orono can be actually above 70%. There's multiple, we have 12 sections to survey and Orono are in Forest Ave rather and sometimes mortality rates can be as high as around 80% on Forest Avenue. But is mortality rate the only thing that matters in these sites. So for example, our rare species present. How many amphibians are actually there? Is it just that somebody found like one dead amphibian and then that site has a really high mortality rate? Is the population likely to exist long term with or without help? Is each site surveyed enough to be confident in that data? So this was stuff that I brought into a model to present to Maine Department of Transportation to say, this is what we think would be most deserving based on this mortality rates based on based on rare species, based on how many amphibians are there, based on how much it's been surveyed. So everywhere that you see a star is a site that we've recommended to the Department of Transportation for getting a crossing structure. Most of them are going to be in southern Maine, but we also have quite a few that we're recommending up in Bangor, you've been one all the way up in Palais. So we've got quite a few that we're recommending. I don't know if or when they will ever get crossing structures, but it's certainly something that we're hoping for. And now that we're a nonprofit, something we're going to try to get a little bit more oomph behind. And just in my last slide here, I want to really emphasize how important these crossing structures are. Basically, if we can reconnect these populations, they can lead to amphibians being protected for decades, potentially even centuries. And we can put these crossing structures and I said this would come back around in places where other wildlife are being hit as well. So deer or moose bear or whatever. And if we can do that, those structures will pay for themselves in the matter of a few years because of how much money it costs when somebody hits a moose or hits a deer. So for example, a structure that prevents one moose collision or three deer collisions per year could end up paying for itself in the matter of about three to five years. So as expensive as they are, and as much as we might look at that price tag and be like, yeah, I'm not going to do that for frogs and salamanders. If we can pair that with some other species, we can actually get some pretty tremendous benefits. And if we look at, by the way, the value of how much we care about amphibians, it's potential that we could get that buyback even sooner. So that was a cool study where people were evaluated for how much monetarily they would value turtles and they apparently value turtles to be about $3,000 per turtle. I don't know if it shakes that to be about the same for amphibians but if it is then that's a lot of money being lost in our amphibians. That's everything and I'm probably landing. All right, one minute right before the hour so I appreciate all of you listening to me. Thank you for listening about this project about our results so far if you want to get involved there's all sorts of ways that you can. Again, we're now a nonprofit so we can take donations as well and they are tax deductible. If you are savvy with Venmo, please feel free to stay in that core code and bear with a few bucks. We're going to do everything we can to stretch that money as far as we can and hopefully eventually get some process structures put in place. Plenty of people that I would like to acknowledge for this work as well. We've had all sorts of organizations and individuals support our project and, in fact, too many to list. But for everyone who does either volunteer or support the project with their skills or effort or otherwise. I just want to say thank you and I'll happily take any questions. Yes. Yep. So there's a few things that we look for when we are predicting whether or not a migration will happen. The main thing is whether or not there is a wetland especially a vernal pool close to the road. The main thing is what is the land cover around the road. So forests tend to be the thing we look for the most amphibians do not like grasslands they don't like agriculture so. And of course they don't like oceans so one side of the road has an ocean or farm, we just consider that's not going to be a migration site nothing is going to be crossing to or from that. Were there any questions on zoom be like 5 or 10 feet deep depending on the location. So that. Yeah, they're usually not digging themselves, but they're utilizing that burrows that already exists from other creatures. In winter, I'd say probably around, you know, 3 to 5 feet, because, you know, once you get below the soil deep enough temperature maintains around, I think it's like 40 degrees Fahrenheit or something like that, even if things are sub zero at the surface. Yeah. I haven't seen it myself. That's something that I really wanted to see but something that I did experience for the first time two years ago was being in the middle of the woods as. Amphibian started emerging and I could hear the leaves like starting to rustle around me so like I would have all my lights off and be like sitting near these vernal pools and listening. And you can hear a frog like start hopping in from somewhere and I'd never experienced that before. But unfortunately I've never seen one directly emerge. Oh, yes, I've got. Yeah, I've got a couple sites near range Lee, but I'm certainly open to more. So if you happen to know of any new sites in that area. I would love to register more. Any other questions. Yeah, so Seaman's road I think I have to me. McCrillis corner which I think is in Wilton, I think I've got one. And then I know there's one or two others actually right on campus here there's a little pond somewhere. Is it pleasant. Abbott. There's a site right there because somebody told me a professor once reported amphibians breeding in that pond so I don't know if anybody's ever surveyed that site but. Yep, one right here in downtown Bromington and by the way to we do sometimes get amphibians in these downtown areas. One of the, let's see if I can go back to my map here real quick. The most interesting sites that I got is in South Portland. It's this little tiny green dot right there. That is a site where we have about four wood frogs remaining from what we can tell. We've gone a couple years now without actually seeing them so it's possible that population no longer exists but there was one tiny pool left completely surrounded by urbanization with these tiny little hamlets of habitat and actually another picture that I've got as well. There was a toad pictures somewhere back here. I came from downtown Waterville. Let's see. Well, I had a lot of slides. I think it was right. Yeah, so these two right here. These guys were in a tiny little wetland motion between the Hannaford parking lot and essentially what was the Walmart parking lot or bank parking lot actually the wetland was about the size of like this table on those couches. There were about 10 toads that were in there calling and meeting. But unfortunately, the year after I detected this population there, it got filled in, and it no longer exists. But it just goes to show that these guys can persist remarkably in spaces that are tiny severely fragmented and surrounded by parking lots or other structures. Well, thank you everyone. Yeah. Yeah, I'd, you'll be joining an army of about 200 of us so far this year, but it'll probably bump up to about 300 for the year. Yeah, thank you. How are you feeling? You feeling okay. I didn't. Oh, thank you so much Nancy for your transport and all that sort of thing. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, but I apologize for the background. You know, I usually try to schedule these for when I don't have. The way it rolls, right? That'd be great. It's actually a temple. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'd love to get his effort from that area. Just, I don't have anybody surveying to pull so perfect. Yeah, that's awesome. Oh, yes, the microphone. Yeah. There you are. Thank you. For mail it. Yes. I can write it down for you. That's like, yeah, you have a pen and paper. Or maybe I can write it on the back or something.