Cool Jelly
Winter is releasing its gentle hold on the Coast Range. Emerald buds swell on bronze salmonberry canes. Alder leaf-rot gives way to an early surge of sprouting larkspur and nettles. Artist Emily Poole and I plunge downhill off a narrow trail, drawn toward the valley floor by standing water that glints through chalky alder trunks. The shallow pool is clear and still as a meditation, a watery remnant of a time when Shotpouch Creek rattled hard against the steep flank of the ridge on its hurried trip toward Mary’s River. The creek has since moved its gurgling energy to the east side of the valley, abandoning the pond to be fed by spring water trickling from a sandstone crack somewhere up the ridge. Beavers long ago dammed the old channel with a matrix of peeled sticks now blackened by age. The pond is encircled by elderly red alder trees. Their decayed trunks are too large to stretch our arms around and are caped in moss sprouting licorice fern that resembles coarse green guard hairs. These ancient ones long ago lost their tops. The task of verticality has been taken up by limbs heavy with lichen, reaching ponderously toward the wan March sun.
My salamander intuition is correct. In the center of the pool, the reflection of alders is pierced by late morning light revealing four northwestern salamander egg masses resting in a foot of cold water. Each cluster is a gelatinous fist clenched around an alder twig and contains about 80 quarter-inch embryos bent like dark commas around creamy yolk sacs. One mass is cratered on the surface; the embryos were chewed out by a rough-skinned newt who now languishes innocently on the mucky bottom.
The adults were here sometime last month. We would love to have seen them, long and thick and brown as Havana cigars, a pair of paratoid glands bulging like misplaced thumbnails from either side of their heads. A male would have clasped a female from above, stroking her with his hind limbs and chin, using tactile and chemical communication. They might have swum together for days, occasionally surfacing for air, the male dismounting, nudging, remounting. He would have been persistent, patiently waiting for a clear but unspoken signal that she would accept his spermatophore, a gelatinous structure capped with a fertile offering of sperm. The couple would have parted ways. In a few days the female, implored by a bulge of fertile eggs, would have wrapped her body around an alder twig and glued her precious cargo with a clear hydrophilic jelly that swelled with cold spring water.
Forward-thinking daylight will stretch into spring. The old alders will leaf out, larkspur and nettle extend themselves above the alder mulch, and the silence will be broken by song sparrow and Pacific wren. Egg capsules will host their version of furious spring growth, becoming progressively greener with the symbiotic alga Oophilia amblystomatis. The specific epithet is named for its host Ambystoma, the salamander genus containing the northwestern salamander Ambystoma gracile. The names are human constructs, but the relationship of embryos to alga is the ancient co-evolutionary business of symbiosis. Growing embryos metabolize their allotment of yolk, producing urea and ammonia as waste products that are a nitrogen-containing superfood for the alga. The alga engages in photosynthesis, producing carbon chains for energy and oxygen as a byproduct. This oxygen enhances embryonic growth; although the dense jelly of the egg mass protects the interior embryos from newt predation, it also reduces their access to water-borne oxygen.
This morning, one tactile assignment remains. I find a stick to extend my reach, step to the edge of the pond, and pull an egg mass gently toward my free hand. Silt that dusted the glass-like globe swirls free, sullying the crystalline water. Emily squats at the edge of the pool, cupping the cool jelly, smiling. Her words echo my thoughts: I could hold this all day! We push this embryonic future back into the pond, trusting their protection to a single-celled alga, an icy flush of spring water, and the reflection of ancient alders.
[This post first appeared in the March 2021 issue of Nature Trails, the monthly publication of the Eugene Natural History Society.]