[Bristol-Birds] About Dr. Stephen Tilley (salamanders) -- VERY LONG
- From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 17:23:27 -0400
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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