A Newt Egg Crawl

Monte Bello Open Space Preserve is split by Stevens Creek and the San Andreas Fault  

 I had a third theory about how red-bellied newts arrived in the Stevens Creek watershed. We doubted the lost race theory because surely some of the thousands of people who live in, visit or study the Santa Cruz Mountains every year would have previously discovered them. And likewise, a recent, successful introduction by humans seems questionable because their strong homing instinct would send the newts plodding across roads and over cliff edges to their death, difficult conditions to get a breeding population established at a new location. Instead, maybe there was a "wormhole" - a passage through space and time that delivered red-bellied newts to this remote corner of Santa Clara County without swimming the deadly saline waters of San Francisco Bay.

Excuse me for mixing up astrophysics and geology. California has spectacular geology that sometimes seems as if it is from science fiction. Perhaps, across the epochs, there was an unusual geologic event equivalent to a wormhole that explains how red-bellied newts arrived and thrived in the Stevens Creek watershed.

The Pepperwood Creek Affair

Dr.Victor C. Twitty (left) and academic colleagues, 1955, Amherst
Photograph from Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg memorial website   

In 1953 through a fishing buddy, Dr. Victor C. Twitty was introduced to a rancher who owned fourteen-thousand acres in rural Sonoma County. Twitty asked the rancher if he could conduct newt research there and the rancher agreed even providing a small house near an amphibian-rich stream. "Thus the Pepperwood Creek Affair was born" and Twitty established a newt field research center far away in miles and in focus from his academic and administrative responsibilities at Stanford University.

Of Salamanders and Men

A red-bellied newt in hand in the field  

"In addition to being a delightful place to live, northern California offers an asset that is perhaps less well known to the millions who have been flocking there in recent years: In my somewhat prejudiced opinion, its newts are unrivaled anywhere in the world!"- Victor Chandler Twitty, Of Scientists and Salamanders, 1966

While they were sorting through the genetic code, the Berkeley team asked us to keep quiet about the unusual sightings of red-bellied newts in Santa Clara County until they had published their results. As a child of two university professors, I was not surprised by this request. So we did what we were best at, tromping around in the forest to learn more about this population especially where they lived.

The Bucket Theory

Preserved specimen of California newt at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.
This is specimen MVZ:Herp:8101.
Photograph from the Museum's Collections Database at     

http://mvz.berkeley.edu   

Late at night I was pouring through field guides, scientific publications, and online catalogues of museum specimens, but they didn't give me answers as to how red-bellied newts arrived in the Stevens Creek watershed. The little creatures we found were so far out of their reported range, if I was going to get any sleep, I needed the help of experts. So I started calling around.