FreeLists / bristol-birds / [Bristol-Birds] About Dr. Stephen Tilley (salamanders) -- VERY LONG

["Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dr. Stephen G. Tilley, who will deliver the lecture "Discovering Salamander 
Diversity in the Southern Appalachians" at the Higher Education Center 
auditorium in Abingdon, Thursday evening (April 14), is one of America's most 
highly recognized authorities on our mountain salamanders.
His talk will get under way at 7:30 p.m. before a capacity crowd.

Dr. Tilley is the Myra M. Sampson Professor of Biology, at the prestigious 
Smith College, the nation's largest liberal arts college for women, located at 
Northhampton, Mass. The private college, with 2,700 undergraduates, is ranked 
among the top 15 liberal arts colleges in the nation.

There Tilley follows in the early footsteps of the famous Emmett R. Dunn 
(patron saint to the entire family Plethodontidae -- lungless salamanders --    
and the father of modern salamander studies). Dunn, a Virginia native, was a 
zoology assistant at Smith College, 1916-1928.  About 1944 he became curator of 
herpetology, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, PA.

Tilley took a B.S. degree at The Ohio State University in 1965; M.S. at 
Michigan, 1967; and earned his Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1970. 

He is more recently known to the naturalist public as a co-author of "Reptiles 
& Amphibians of the Smokies." He teamed with Dr. James E. Huheey, biology 
professor at the University of Maryland. Both of these individuals have 
extensive experience researching the herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians) of 
the Southern Appalachians. Dr. Huheey is known to area naturalists as the 
speaker at the 1981 Mount Rogers Naturalist Rally east of Marion, VA.  He was 
the lead author,  with park naturalist Arthur Stupka, of the 1967 classic, 
pioneering book on the amphibians and reptiles of the Great Smoky Mountains 
National Park. 

Tilley has been a collaborator with Dr. Joe Bernardo for their paper "Life 
history evolution in plethodontid salamanders" published in 1993 in 
Herpetologica 49:154-163. Dr. Bernardo came to East Tennessee State University 
and associated himself with the biology department a few years ago when his 
wife joined the university's administrative staff. More recently he has become 
associated with the College of Charleston as an assistant professor. Bernardo 
makes his home at Roan Mountain, TN, where he created and directs the Southern 
Appalachian Biodiveristy Institute.  He studies the genetic population 
structure and systematics of Desmognathus and other plethodontids in the 
southern Appalachian Mountains. 

Tilley is also working with Dr. Rebecca A. Pyles, recently interim dean, 
College of Arts & Sciences at ETSU and present associate professor, Department 
of Biological Sciences. They are working on a new species of desmognathine 
salamander from northeastern Tennessee.

Dr. Tilley's doctoral research at Ohio State was "Aspects of the reproductive 
and population ecology of Desmognathus ochrophaeus in the southern Appalachian 
Mountains." There he studied under the famous Dr. Donald W. Tinkle, a 
herpetologist and ornithologist, who was curator, Division of Reptiles and 
Amphibians, Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, 1965-1980. Dr. 
Tinkle passed away in Feb. 1989 at the very young age of 50.

During the past 18 years, Tilley has been instructing a course at Highlands 
Biological Station in western North Carolina every other year to acquaint 
students with plethodontid (woodland) salamanders and to show how studies of 
these creatures have enhanced our understanding of other evolutionary and 
ecological topics. The Highlands station has served as a regional field station 
for biological research and education in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. 
since 1927. It is an inter-institutional facility of the University of North 
Carolina. It is administered by Western Carolina University.

It was there, recently, that Kevin Hamed, former naturalist at Steele Creek 
Park Nature Center in Bristol Tennessee, was a student of Tilley's and took a 
seasonal course in salamanders. That course is the reason Dr. Tilley was 
invited to Abingdon this week to speak as part of the Appalachian Spring 
Illustrated Lecture Series. Hamed is currently on the biology faculty at 
Virginia Highlands Community College.

Tilley and his students work in a realm of evolutionary biology that is 
concerned with how populations undergo genetic differentiation and evolve 
toward becoming different species. They want to know what species each of these 
types of animals actually are.

They work primarily with "dusky salamanders" of the genus Desmognathus, a group 
that is restricted to eastern North America and achieves its highest diversity 
in the southern Appalachian Mountains. 

Characters that humans can readily perceive and measure, such as behavior, 
color, shape, and size, seem to evolve very slowly in these creatures. 
Different forms can thus be genetically distinct and reproductively isolated 
while being morphologically extremely similar. With starch gel electrophoresis 
and nucleic acid sequencing, they have revealed that what were once thought to 
be single species of Desmognathus are, in fact, complexes of forms that have 
undergone considerable genetic differentiation. 

Since 1996,  their work has led to the partitioning of the Mountain Dusky 
Salamander, Desmognathus ochrophaeus, into a complex of five species, including 
two new forms: Blue Ridge Dusky Salamander and Cumberland Dusky Salamander. 
They are currently concentrating on a complex of species and populations in the 
southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. 

Tilley is among an elite group of researchers who have made significant 
advancements in the understanding of these salamanders during the past 15 
years. As such, he has been involved in the dramatic recent discover of several 
new species of salamanders.

One of Tilley's more recent contributions was with Smith College student, 
Jennifer Anderson, whom he teamed with in 2003 to describe the new-to-science 
Cumberland Dusky Salamander, D. abditus, named because of its restriction to 
the Cumberland Plateau. It was published as Anderson, Jennifer A. & Stephen G. 
Tilley. 2003. "Systematics of the Desmognathus ochrophaeus Complex in the 
Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee."  Herpetological Monographs 17: 75-110. The 
salamander was found in a small tributary of Daddy's Creek, Cumberland County, 
Tennessee. The description of an unidentified species was first given in 
Anderson's senior thesis, "A new species of Desmognathus from the Cumberland 
Plateau of Tennessee," which she completed in 1999 under Tilley's supervision. 
The word "abditus" is Latin for concealed or secret. Anderson and Tilley chose 
the name because the salamander has remained hidden for so long. 

Another new species he was instrumental in discovering was the Dwarf Blackbelly 
Salamander, Desmognathus folkertsi, by Carlos D. Camp, Stephen G. Tilley, 
Richard M. Austin, Jr., and Jeremy L. Marshall. 2002. "A New Species of the 
genus Desmognathus from the Appalachian Mountains of Northern Georgia." 
Herpetologica 58(4): 471-484. They described the species from Union County, 
Georgia and (possibly) Cherokee County, North Carolina. It closely resembles 
the previously known Black-bellied Salamander, D. quadramaculatus, but the two 
are distinguishable by adult size, body proportions, color pattern, and fixed 
differences at four allozyme loci. The new, smaller species is currently known 
from two tributaries of the Nottely River and is sympatric with D. 
quadramaculatus at both sites. The new form is semi-aquatic and utilizes 
habitats that are similar to those of D. quadramaculatus. Metamorphosis occurs 
at a smaller size than in D. quadramaculatus, apparently as a result of a 
shorter larval period. Selection on life history features may have had a role 
in the origin and divergence of these forms.

Yet another new species he described has been the Santeetlah Dusky Salamander, 
Desmognathus santeetlah, 1981, belonging to Santeetlah Creek, NC. It was taken 
from the Unicoi and Great Smoky and Great Balsam mountains in the Southern 
Appalachians. Several prominent herpetologists have since recognized this 
lineage as a species distinct from the Dusky Salamander, D. fuscus. Whether or 
not this is a subspecies of the Dusky Salamander, is debated by the renowned 
herpetologist James Patranka an associate professor at the University of North 
Carolina at Asheville. Tilley described the Santeetlah Dusky Salamander from 
high elevations along the Tennessee-North Carolina border and stated that past 
reports of the Dusky Salamander, D. fuscus, in the park probably referred to D. 
santeetlah. Tilley (1985) identified D. fuscus from Whiteoak Sinks in Great 
Smoky Mountains National Park. The status of D. fuscus at low elevations in the 
park needs further study. 

A fourth new species described is the Blue Ridge Dusky Salamander, Desmognathus 
orestes, a common high elevation mountain salamander. It was published in 1996 
by Tilley and M.J. Mahoney. This species is known from Roan Mountain in 
Tennessee and Mount Rogers in Southwest Virginia. It is distributed in the 
areas at the corner of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. In their field 
research they sampled populations of this species from the following locations 
in Carter Co., TN: Roan Mountain, Clark Creek, Tom's Creek, Limestone Cover, 
Sugar Hollow, Vanderpool Ridge, Bear Branch II, Wilder Mind Hollow and Morgan 
Branch. In Southwest Virginia they sampled populations at Iron Mountain in 
Smyth County, Send Mountain in Wythe County and Mount Rogers in Grayson County.

Thursday at Abingdon, you will watch and listen as one of the recent great 
herpetologists of our times talks about our "herpetological holly ground," as 
the late Maurice Brooks of the University of West Virginia once wrote. You will 
listen as a contemporary giant of herpetology.  A man who walks on hallowed 
soil near the footprints of such famous salamander pioneers as Emmett Dunn, 
S.N. Rhoads, Charles S. Brimley, M. Graham Netting, a young Worth Hamilton 
Wheller, Clifford Pope, Richard Highton and so many others. Weller was a high 
school student in 1930 when he fell to his death from on a high slope at Grand 
Father Mountain, NC.   He was collecting a new species to science -- Plethodon 
welleri (Weller's Salamander) which was later named for him.

If you have read this far and are not in the audience Thursday, 7:30 p.m., at 
the Higher Education Center, you have missed a rare opportunity for any 
southern Appalachian naturalist. If you are there, you will pause at the next 
salamander you encounter and reflect with a new passion, new knowledge and new 
respect for these amazing creatures.

Wallace Coffey
Bristol, TN








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