Day 15: Successful Egg Hunt

Emily, Harry, Aunt Carleen, and I had a great hike out to the vernal pools today (Mary is out in NY with friends).  Today's blog will border a bit on the geeky side, but it is soooo wicked cool.  We found several spotted salamander eggs masses today, a few days after the night time migration that Emily and I observed.  Photos from today's hike are further below in this blog, but I have to lead off with the really cool nerd stuff...

The photos below are of the same eggs in our aquarium setup, taken about 3 hours apart.  In the photo on the left, you will see that most of the eggs are a single sphere (1 cell) or start to split with some cleavage (2 cell).  If you compare the egg by the arrow point in both photos, you will see that it divided from an (almost) 2 cell stage to a 4 cell stage in this short time period. 

We were extremely lucky to observe the start of the cell division from a singel cell stage.  Emily is following along and we expect to have a blastula sometime tomorrow (thousands of cells).  Okay, so here are other photos from today....

Vernal Pool:

Egg masses attached to twigs in the vernal pool:

Harry and Emily climbing a rock and screwing around:

Emily's aquarium setup with one of the egg masses collected today.  You can see that each egg is encased in some thick jelly, and the entire egg cluster is encased in a more transparent jelly covering.