Newtlandia

Red-bellied newts spend most of their lives underground and we know little about what they do there.   

The genetic results for the unusual population of red-bellied newts were in. Two newts from the newly discovered population in Santa Clara County were compared to forty newts from the main range in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt Counties. The populations were genetically indistinguishable from each other.

They were all the same. We were stunned.

This meant we could not determine if the previously unknown Stevens Creek newts were a naturally disjunct population or were introduced by humans from the northern range. These were surprising results for a salamander species.

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.