Egg collecting

This past Saturday I went with my lab to collect some egg masses. It turned out to be a gorgeous day and the sites were so nice! I could get used to this :)


These are Pseudacris regilla, Pacific Tree frog, eggs. These guys are very common and they have been calling for over a week now. The eggs are smaller than Rana aurora (below) and fresh ones have a pearly yellowish iridescence to them. They remind me of tiger's eye gemstones.
This massive blob belongs to Rana aurora, the Northern Red-legged frog. They quickly became my favorite after I saw some adults for the first time! They were the easiest to see as they are pretty large. Many of the masses had little white dots sprinkled on them like parmesan cheese. That is the evil water mold genus: Saprolegnia. Saprolegnia degrades dead tissue and protein! Ew! People mainly study it as it pertains to fish stock and the aquaculture industry but it can affect amphibians too!
This is a Northwestern salamander, Ambystoma gracile, egg mass. Thus far, the squishy-ness of the red-legged and pacific tree frog masses have not bothered me. They are clear, they look like clear jello/raw egg whites and they certainly feel like that. But these eggs are so weird!!! You see how it has a defined shape in this picture? The other masses are basically a loose blob. But NW salamander eggs are clustered in an oval shaped mass around a rigid reed/stick/stem of some kind. There was one pond that had submerged tree branches and there were TONS of A. gracile masses hanging off those branches.
Here you can see a A. gracile mass out of water. Notice how the shape keeps it forms? When you squeeze one it is very dense and hard. It's soft, squishy and hard at the same time. What?! I know. It's a paradox. OK, not really but still pretty neat!

A quick search revealed the jelly is deposited around the egg in layers and that without it, the egg can't be fertilized...Interesting indeed! The goopy substance is a mix of protein, some things called hexose and hexosamine, and other compounds. I was surprised to see there was not that much stuff out there about the jelly-like substance. I will have to dig around to find out more about it.

In other news, meet my new friend Phaeton:



He is a Northwestern salamander! Yes so he came from one of those dense egg masses! He is two years old (He might be a she, I really have no idea at this point but I'm calling Phaeton a boy). They collected him and his siblings and took them back to the lab where they started eating each other! Typical. So they separated and housed them in plastic cups. They don't do anything with them so me and two other grads students from another amphibian lab took them as office pets. He was the most active of the three constantly swimming up and down in the cup and peering up at me, so I named him after the Greek mythological figure Phaeton. Sharp readers might remember this name from an old blog post about the genus name of the red-tailed tropicbird, Phaeton rubricauda! I thought it was fitting. Although I do not intend to strike him down with a thunderbolt as Zeus did!
In his new tank he has a lot more room to swim; the glass walls let him peer out at his surroundings for the first time! He likes to perch on top of the white tubes sometimes when we have one of our telepathic mind conversations. Right now his home is pretty sparse, just a tank with his 2 white hiding tubes on the bottom, but I am changing his water tomorrow and have brown gravel and a fake plant waiting for him :D