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Salamanders
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I am living in an interesting area. The salamanders are still reproducing because there are small ones as well as large ones. There is water coming up from below so the area is scattered slightly wetland islands. One percent of what it was, originally three feet of standing water in places, but still enough for salamanders living where there is no standing water, nearest small stream, 100 yards away. The turtles are long gone, run over in the road trying to find a sunny, sandy hillside to lay their eggs. Both land and water.
For whatever reason snakes are very rare.
Toads are pretty much also gone. If anything you might see a couple of medium size leopard frogs in the wet grass during the whole warm season.
Then we get to the worms.
The forests that reformed after the last ice age grew up without worms. It has taken 10,000 years for the worms to reach a population composed of many species to cover enough area to actually have a negative impact on the forests that grew up without large worm populations.
We have all kinds, night crawlers that live a couple of feet under ground. Ordinary compost worms that live in the top 12 inches of top soil. And then there are the crazy jumping worms. Comparatively smaller than the compost worms, they live in the clutter between the dead leafy coverage and the soil surface. There is no humus, or rotting layers between the dry leaf cover and the soil surface. The worms eat every single bit of it before it can decompose into new dirt.
The crazy jumping worms are so named because when you run across one and prod it, it will writher about so violently it will appear to be leaping off the ground at times. Unlike compost worms they live above ground, in protected drier areas where you wouldn't expect to see worms. They like to live in places like the drier mulch that piles up around trees and in gardens.
The worm casings of the jumping worms are round hard balls that don't fall apart creating dirt, they stay hard and dry, like clay BBs. They form a soil that has a high drainage factor and low nutrition. Seedlings that start out in this soil will grow until the first dry spell, which only needs to be a few days, at which point the seedlings' shallow roots will dry up, the seedlings then die. Effectively preventing new growth. Older growth with deep roots will grow slow because the nutrition value of the worm dirt is low but their roots don't dry out. So everything looks okay.
Ever since I noticed the soil in the wooded areas was turning into soil that was best described as "over tilled" I have been googling worm damage to forests. Each time you look you find something new. The latest piece of information to fall my way out of the data sediment drowning out everything that is not replicated a million times is the fact the worms in the soil are concentrating man made pollutants that are in the soil. These worms are possibly poisonous to what tries to eat them.
You won't find this in a book but you might find it in your backyard or local parks.
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Good genetic engineering courtesy of mother nature.
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Good point - Mother Nature is the ultimate bioengineer!
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We did not have newts, as they didn't make it across the landbridges from Britain before the sea rose. But I've seen a programme on our national broadcaster RTE about a pond in the north of Ireland in a wood, which is filled with newts. Someone obviously released them and they have been thriving. Possibly the local herons don't recognise them.
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http://www.defendersblog.org/2015/07/...