Mudpuppies will take center stage at the 15th annual Winter Wonderland at Wolf Lake event Saturday.
Southern Illinois University graduate student Alicia Beattie will talk about the research she’s doing on the large, brown, fully aquatic salamanders that live at Wolf Lake, starting at 9:30 a.m. at the Environmental Education Center in Hammond, located at 2405 Calumet Ave.
In the afternoon, the festival will shift to the William Powers State Fish & Wildlife Area, located at 126th Place and Avenue O in Chicago’s Hegewisch section. The festival will include presentations from ecologist Les Marszalek, who will speak about retrieving Native American artifacts; Dr. Young Choi of Purdue University Calumet will lead a birding tour; and Jeannie Regan-Dinius of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources will discuss the Underground Railroad in Northwest Indiana.
Mudpuppies were once used as bait on the lake, but they haven’t been spotted as often recently. They are now a threatened species in Illinois. There has been little research done on the species, so Beattie and a research team led by Dr. Phil Willink, senior research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium, are gathering information on the mudpuppy population, what they eat and how they contribute to the ecosystem.
“I have a couple of different goals for the presentation,” Beattie said. “I want to make sure people know about mudpuppies, which are sometimes misunderstood or some people have never heard of them. I’ll talk about some common misconceptions, look at the basic ecology, show some preliminary results and what I hope to achieve.”
Mudpuppies typically grow to 11 to 18 inches in length. Though they are amphibians, they never leave the water. Their most prominent feature are their red curly gills.
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Through December, Beattie has caught 113 mudpuppies. Trapping usually goes on from October through May. When they are caught, Beattie uses a nonlethal stomach massage to find out what they are eating, then she inserts a Passive Integrated Transponder into their tails before releasing them back into the water. Each transponder has a unique number, so researchers can simply scan their tails to see if they’ve been caught before.
“Seventeen times last season, I got recaptures, and within that I had some triple recaptures,” Beattie said. “It can happen couple days later, or I catch one and say ‘Oh, I saw you a month ago.'”
The warm fall and early winter didn’t negatively impact Beattie’s mudpuppy research.
“I did have quite a bit of success despite having a warm fall,” Beattie said. “It was quite the switch from last year when January had a foot of ice.”
Mudpuppies are most active in the cold winter months, but ice conditions at Wolf Lake haven’t been conducive to trapping lately. Beattie is scheduled to do a demonstration of how she catches the mudpuppies with minnow traps Saturday afternoon, but the ice isn’t thick enough at this time to set up the traps.
“I kind of have to wait to get thick ice or for it to be consistently clear,” Beattie said. “I had to cancel my last trip. I don’t want to put out traps in the water, then come back and not be able to get to them.”
Michael Boos, executive director of event sponsor the Association for the Wolf Lake Initiative, said the uncertain ice conditions will put the kibosh on planned ice skating and cross-country skiing activities.
“I don’t think ice is thick enough and I think with warm up coming, we definitely won’t have enough for skating and skiing,” Boos said. “We’ll have some outdoor activities (like hiking).”
Beattie said the interest of local fishermen in her research has been an unexpected reward.
“A lot of them say ‘Oh, you’re back!’, because sometimes I haven’t seen them for several months,” Beattie said. “It’s not really the experience that I expected as a graduate student. It’s been pretty fun. I really like the human side of the project.”
For more information on the event, visit www.wolflakeinitiative.org.