Cool Critters Lake Erie Water Snake Educator Guide

Within and along the waters of Lake Erie (one of the five Great Lakes), there is a daily struggle for survival between natives and unwelcome invasive species.  Most times, these unwanted invaders have negative consequences for the lake’s long-standing residents.  However, there are rare occasions when the native actually benefits.

Kristin Stanford, herpetologist, researcher, and snake lover from Northern Illinois University, has been observing this struggle for over ten years as the Recovery Plan Coordinator for the Lake Erie water snake. She works out of Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory on South Bass Island in western Lake Erie. An expert on these snakes, Kristin, aka “The Island Snake Lady,” works hard to educate students and the public about them, and encourages the islanders to co-exist peacefully with their slithery neighbors.

Lake Erie Water Snake (LEWS)

One of six species of snake found on South Bass Island, Lake Erie water snakes (or LEWS for short) are a species found only in the western basin of Lake Erie, in Ohio and southern Ontario, Canada. The reason the water snakes were listed as a state endangered, federally threatened species in 1999 was due to three primary threats to their population – low population size, habitat destruction, and human persecution.

South Bass Island is a very popular spot for vacationers, with homes built along the shore, boats in the harbor, and hundreds of visitors rattling around the island on golf carts every day. It’s not too far across the water from nearby Cedar Point Amusement Park. Kristin invited us out to the island, one of a series of three small islands – South, Middle and North Bass Islands – to search for snakes.

So, how does one count snakes? Kristin takes a group of five to ten hardy volunteers to fourteen different study sites on the island, to – as she says – “scour the shore line” for all of the adult snakes that they are able to catch.

Kristin’s prime hunting ground is the Scheeff East Point Nature Preserve on the northern point of the island. Our production crew arrived on a hot and humid June morning to find that mayflies had invaded the island, adding to the gross factor of our visit. These insects flew up out of the grass and covered our heads, clothes, and equipment. Luckily, they don’t bite as they don’t even have mouths! Their only career goal is to mate, lay eggs in the lake and die within three days. Once we got used to the mayflies, we turned our attention to snakes.

Hunting for LEWS

At some of their study sites, the researchers place heavy black mats on the ground. The snakes love to snuggle under the mats to keep warm. Kristin warned us that one mat in particular has been doing really well. “When I lift it up, there’s probably going to be about forty snakes underneath.”

YIKES! She wasn’t kidding. There were a bunch, and she gamely grabbed two handfuls of the writhing reptiles. Normally she has several people to help her. Today, she struggled by herself, and managed to get a few into a pillowcase she had brought along as a snake catching bag. And yes, they bite, but they’re not poisonous. She does get bitten in the course of gathering snakes, but they’re usually gone by the next day.

Kristin and her colleagues estimate the number of water snakes by utilizing “mark and recapture techniques.” They insert a small microchip called a pit tag under the skin of the adult snakes they capture, and use the ratio of marked animals to unmarked animals to generate population and density estimates for the Lake Erie water snake.

Kristin plucks a snake out of the grass near the lake shore, and points out the green mark on its back that means it’s been captured and given a pit tag recently. “So what we can do then is scan it and get the pit tag number and re-release it relatively quickly.”

“After we catch the animals, we take some appropriate and annual regular data on them including snout to vent length, mass, we score them for sex and color pattern, and then we also look for the presence of recently consumed prey items. And all that involves is looking for a little bulge inside the snake’s belly. When we see that, we slowly and gently regurgitate that and then we will bring those samples back to the laboratory for further analysis and we identify them to species and that’s how we’re able to determine that the water snakes are eating about 90% round gobies now.”

What are round gobies? No, they’re not fancy marbles. They are a small invasive fish species to Lake Erie, from the Black and Caspian Seas, arriving in the ballast of cargo ships about the mid-1990s. They are considered a very harmful species because they are voracious nest predators for many of Lake Erie’s bottom-dwelling fish and game fish. They gobble up all of the eggs and fry in a very short period of time. And there are BILLIONS of them in Lake Erie now.

So, normally there is not much good to say about an invasive species. But Kristin explained, “It was about the mid to late 1990s when we started seeing gobies pop up in Lake Erie water snake diet samples.”  As they continued to study the snakes, they started seeing more and more gobies popping up in their diet samples, and now, Kristin tells us, round gobies are about 90% of the water snake’s diet.

And what effect is this new menu item having on the Lake Erie water snake? Kristin and her colleagues have been able to show that, since the water snakes have been eating round gobies, “they have increased their growth rate, they’ve increased their maximum body size, so they can grow bigger than they ever could before, they’ve increased their reproductive rate, as well as their survival rate, and population growth rate.” The result – a population explosion of water snakes on the Lake Erie Islands, and also the nearby mainland.

Due in part to the impact of the round gobies, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced on August 15 that the Lake Erie water snake has been removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered wildlife. And that is – at least from the point of view of the snakes AND the Island Snake Lady – “a really great ending to our story.”

 Salt Creek Tiger Beetle Educator Guide

There's the atlas beetle that's black and shiny like a newly washed Harley Davidson motorcycle. There's leafcutter ants that slice leaves off of trees with a cut as clean as a butcher's knife would make. (Those leaves become fungi, which is actually what they eat.) I'd never seen anything like a violin mantis before. This bark-colored creature flexes at the joints as it moves to make it seem more like a robot.

"Eewww!!" That's what a lot of people say when they see bugs. Kay Klatt, Supervisor of the Butterfly and Insect Pavilion at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, says, "That's perfect. That's what gets people interested, especially young people. What is that? What does it do? How does that work? That's what might motivate someone to want to work with insects when they grow up."

The staff couldn't stop telling me about the creatures as they showed them to me. They talked about how many times they've been bitten or what species have bitten them, but they even did that with enthusiasm. I learned a lot about many types of bugs in a short amount of time. But the other thing I learned is that rare and fragile creatures like Salt Creek tiger beetles are in good hands when people like this are looking out for them. The odds are stacked against the tiger beetles, but if they make it, it will be because there are people with a passion to help them.

The passion will be a test of patience for the next several months. All the staff can do with the Salt Creek tiger beetle larvae is feed it. To do that, its food is placed at the top of a tube of soil, then the larvae will come to the top to get it. I was surprised to learn that's about all the staff can do — watch and wait until (hopefully) the larvae turn into beetles and then can be released into saline habitats near Lincoln next spring.

The Salt Creek tiger beetle is one of the most endangered species in the United States, with only two to five hundred beetles left. They're found only in a small saline wetland area just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. We visited the wetland with Mitch Paine, a former research assistant at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln who worked with the beetles and comes back every summer to photograph the Salt Creek tiger beetles.

Produced by Diego Moreno / QUEST Nebraska. Beetle photographs by Mitch Paine.

Seahorses are sold as expensive ingredients used in
traditional Chinese medicine.

Not surprisingly, I jumped at the chance to produce the Quest "Seahorse Sleuth" story, but I will admit that the process of making this piece was demoralizing, to say the least. I spent days in San Francisco’s Chinatown trying to get shop owners who sell Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to talk to me about their trade, and specifically about seahorses. I must have visited 20 or so stores, multiple times, and I saw many hundreds of dried seahorses and thousands of shark fins, not to mention enormous piles of antlers, skins, penises, and whole dried animals. Though I tried many different approaches, no one would talk to me…I was clearly an outsider and not to be trusted. (Had I managed to garner the trust of one of the shop owners, I would have certainly included them in the piece). This experience made me even more impressed and appreciative of the hard work that the folks at Project Seahorse are doing, and exhausted at the thought of how far they still have to go to convince fisherman and governments around the world not to decimate their seahorse populations.

But whereas Project Seahorse must be measured and careful in their approach to these conversations about TCM in order to make headway, I feel that in this blog I can be more forthcoming about my feelings about the use of these animals, and all animals, in TCM.

Of course TCM has a rich history dating back at least 2,000 years, and at least a quarter of the world's population uses this form of medicine. I myself find acupuncture and herbal remedies to be very helpful and do not wish to debunk the efficacy of at least those two parts of the tradition. But I personally draw the line at the use of animals, because I'm a huge animal lover, and I am absolutely appalled at the use of endangered or threatened species for any use. This planet may have seemed endlessly bountiful 2000 years ago, but today we can no longer afford to take the survival of non-human species for granted. To add salt to the wound, it is my understanding that China does not, as of yet, perform the kind of rigorous testing of these products that we must perform for drugs in the U.S. to determine their effectiveness. (This is why we get products from China with arsenic in them, for example). One of the main uses of dried seahorses (and many other dried animals) in TCM is for male virility, though I do not believe there have been any studies that actually prove it has any effect on virility. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s dumbfounding that a country with an official one-child policy, which has led to female infanticide levels that have caused a significant gender imbalance in China, thinks they need to ingest threatened and endangered species to improve the potency of their male population. Let's put the pieces together here folks.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soapbox now, since I'm getting into territory that I am certainly not an expert in. But I did want to present this topic for open discussion – since that's what blogs are for. But before you get too riled up, let me suggest a few websites for further research.

First of all, learn what you can do to help save seahorses by signing on to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seahorse Conservation Page. You can also brush up on the specific uses of Endangered Animals in Traditional Chinese Medicine with this informative paper on Encyclopedia's “Advocacy for Animals” site.

TRAFFIC (The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network) has a new Chinese-language textbook aimed at raising awareness on how to best protect threatened species used in TCM. Lastly, check out The World Wildlife Fund’s FAQ page on Traditional Chinese Medicine.

And that’s just to get you started…the web has plenty of information on this topic…read it and tell your friends!

Watch the Seahorse Sleuths television story online.

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