In the tiny hamlet of Oxford Mills, Friday evenings are Mudpuppy Night. The open water below the old mill dam offers an unusual opportunity to encounter Ontario’s aquatic salamanders in winter habitat. Dr. Fred Schueler, who has surveyed the mudpuppy population at Oxford Mills for a number of years, shares his expertise with visitors. You can learn more about the event at his website linked here. It is reported:
Since 1998 Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills’has been taking observers to the only place in Ontario where Mudpuppies have been repeatedly observed in large numbers throughout the winter, the longest-running winter hempetological outing in Canada.
Seabrooke and I had been trying to coordinate an outing for much of the winter and finally made it to Oxford Mills on the evening of February 21st. It drizzled for much of the day, but late in the afternoon the rain stopped and the sun came out just in time to set. We joined an intrepid group from the Kingston Field Naturalists who had made the long drive to attend.
The mudpuppies can be seen on the rocky bed of the river, highlighted by Fred’s flashlight. A few are gently netted and placed in a cooler so that visitors can get a better look at them.
This was a return visit for Seabrooke and I. We first attended Mudpuppy Night in 2011. You can find additional photos of the mudpuppies at my earlier blog post linked here.
Mudpuppies are amazing. This information is provided on the Mudpuppy Night website:
Mudpuppies, Necturus maculosus, are foot-long permanently aquatic Salamanders. They retain the gills and smooth skin of larvae as adults, and go undetected in many water-bodies because of their secretive habits. Mudpuppies are slow and cautious, though they can swim nearly as fast as a fish on occasion. In May females deposit 50-150 eggs on the underside of a flat rock. The female guards the eggs, and attends the larvae after they hatch.
About 25 years ago herpetologists realized that Mudpuppies are active, and feed actively, all winter, because they can be caught in baited minnowtraps in the winter but not in the summer. Mudpuppies were long famous for having more DNA in each cell than just about any other animal, and this winter activity has shown that the abundant DNA provides Mudpuppies with the array of temperature-adjusted enzymes they require to remain active in water from 0°-32° C. Mudpuppies are fairly common in the Ottawa River and its major tributaries, north to the Arctic Watershed, and the Canadian range extends through southern Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba.
Willow House Chronicles 
This is fascinating. So glad you went and wrote about Mud puppies.
really interesting! Great post!
Talk about a way to chase the winter blues! Did you hold one this time, or just observe?
Why don’t Mudpuppies get caught in baited traps in the summertime?
This time, we just observed. Mudpuppies are caught by ice fishermen occassionally, so they were known to be active in winter. Don’t know where the minnow trap enters into it.
Oh, I think I get it now. The salamanders must be entering the ice fishermen’s bait traps looking for lunch. Fisher hauls up his trap, expecting to bait his hook with minnow, and finds greedy salamander. Disgruntled fisher offs salamander. So now what I don’t understand is why fisher doesn’t use one greedy salamander to bait a dozen hooks instead of murdering several salamanders to no purpose? I’ll just never understand humans.
Yeah, the whole Joy of Killing thing baffles me. Hunting or fishing to stay alive is one thing. Hunting ’cause it’s a fun day out killing things? Just freaky.
This is most interesting. I have seen lots of salamanders but I did not even know we have mudpuppies in Ontario! I thought they only lived in the south. That must have been a very interesting outing.
I would like to see salamanders mating which is supposed to take place in early spring. So far we have seen 4 different kinds of salamanders in the summer, usually under a rock, but also walking with a flashlight at night in the middle of a rain storm.
Thank you for telling us about them.
I know you are supposed to go out in the first heavy rain of spring, the ‘Salamander Rain’, to look for mating salamanders, but I have never been intrepid enough to follow through on this. You might enjoy “Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year” by David M. Carroll, which is where I first read of the salamander rain.