Steps Toward Saving Salamanders Are Set in Motion

On a warm, rainy night in the winter of 1990, biologists Mike Westphal and Rich Seymour were driving down Junipero Serra Boulevard, scouring the street for hints of movement, when Westphal slammed on the brakes. Waddling across the wet roadway was a California tiger salamander, a species that hadn’t been reported on campus in decades. Farther down: a graveyard of “deaders” flattened by cars. This was a problem.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was enacted to provide a process for identifying and conserving at-risk animals and plants, and restricts the use of their habitats to activities permitted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (F&WS). “You get a listed [species] on your central campus without a permit, and you’ve got some issues,” says Alan Launer, ’81, MS ’82, Stanford’s director of conservation planning. Ambystoma californiense wasn’t yet on the list, but the university needed a strategy to protect the mud dweller, lest routine operations—replacing aging pipes or evicting salamanders from utility boxes—become prohibited by law. 

By 2004, when the salamanders were declared threatened (a less grave status than endangered), the university had designated protected space for the amphibians, discontinued the annual Big Game bonfire at Lake Lagunita, built wildlife tunnels under Junipero Serra Boulevard, and dug eight breeding ponds in the Foothills. Its agreement with the F&WS also covers the threatened California red-legged frog and “an intergrade population of garter snake.”

With luck, this fall hundreds of juvenile tiger salamanders will totter from Lake Lag to the Foothills as members of what is believed to be the last remaining population on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.