A former strip mine may not seem to be the most likely place to find wildlife, but a new study from biologists at UVA Wise finds salamanders are breeding on some mine sites.
A few years ago, students in Wally Smith’s biology classes began noticing a surprising discovery—spotted salamanders are finding their way onto wetlands on former mine sites.
“When you see some of these wetlands, they don’t look like pristine, you know, wetlands out in the wilderness,” Smith said. “But the salamanders still love it. Which, you know, is possibly promising for other mines in the region.”
300 acres of the UVA Wise campus in Southwest Virginia was formerly mined. Smith explains this land was first mined in the late 1800s, and then strip-mined, which ended in the early 2000s.
After mountains are strip-mined, it can take decades for plants and animals to return to the land, and the landscape is never completely restored. Smith said, though strip-mining is incredibly destructive to the environment, their research shows some wildlife can find habitats on these lands after they’re reclaimed.
Before mining, there probably were no wetlands in this part of Wise, but these small ponds formed after the land was stripped and then reclaimed. There has been very little human-caused changes made to the environment at these sites in the past twenty years.
Smith and his team spent years analyzing which wetlands on campus the salamanders preferred to lay their eggs in. “They were just little black salamanders with yellow spots, and most of them were quite chubby,” said Hunter Hill, one of the students who worked on the study.
Their research found that spotted salamanders tended to lay their eggs in smaller, shallow ponds, and in wetlands further from roadways. They also stayed away from water that were impacted by Acid-mine drainage from former mines.
Spotted salamanders live in forests, spend most of their life underground and emerge in the spring to return to the pond where they were born to lay eggs, so it’s still a mystery how these salamanders found newly formed wetlands. “A really interesting and unanswered question still I think is, how does a spotted salamander find a wetland way up on a ridge where there hasn’t been a wetland before?” Smith said.
He said as more reclaimed mine lands are repurposed for solar development, it’s important to analyze what wildlife exists there.
“I think this kind of research points us towards more of a realistic situation where it’s maybe not a question of, yes or no, should you rebuild on a former surface mine or should you not,” Smith said. “But how can you work around things like these wetlands that are serving as native habitat for native wildlife. And how can we assist the recovery of that wildlife while we’re also trying to reuse a surface mine?”
Smith helped compile a short guide for developers based on their research, with recommendations for protecting wildlife when building on former mine sites.
Their full study was published in the Virginia Journal for Science.
