IDON’T RECALL who tipped me off to the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy’s email newsletter, but I am glad that I found it and signed up. Those of you who are longtime listeners or readers of A Way to Garden know that I have, shall we say, a “thing” for frogs … so maybe it’s no surprise that I was delighted to discover an organization that is implementing a network of on-the-ground conservation projects around the U.S. in behalf of imperiled amphibians, as well as for reptiles.
The non-profit Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy’s mission is to identify and conserve the highest-priority places for amphibians and reptiles, in support of these important animals.
I contacted its executive director, conservation biologist JJ Apodaca, to ask him if some of that deep conservation expertise his team applies in their work could be sort of distilled for us gardeners, so that we can create landscapes that are more hospitable to these essential members of the food web, whose needs we too-often overlook. I got some helpful suggestions—and also learned some astonishing facts about amphibians, especially salamanders.
Read along as you listen to the Aug. 3, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
(Illustration, above, is the Conservancy’s United States of Herpetofauna map; more on that here and on Instagram, and the map is also available on merchandise that supports their work. Photo of JJ Apodaca, below, by Mike Knoerr.)
amphibian ways of life, with jj apodaca
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Margaret Roach: Welcome, JJ. You’re in Asheville, aren’t you, in North Carolina?
JJ Apodaca: I am. In the beautiful mountains here in the Blue Ridge.
Margaret: Yeah. So just in the way of introduction to the animals and the organization, your website explains that amphibians and reptiles are among the most threatened vertebrate groups in the world. So tell us a little bit about their role in the bigger picture, and maybe about how the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy approaches helping them.
JJ: Sure. Well, I mean, all of us are familiar with some amphibians and reptiles. Most of us come in contact with frogs or turtles at some point throughout the year, and that’s such a gift and a reminder of what amazing species they are.
Margaret: They are indeed [laughter]. They are indeed. And in terms of, like I said, in the introduction, of the food web and so forth, I mean, they’re prey and they’re predators; they do various jobs depending on the species. I mean, they’re important, and yet we don’t think about them enough, I think.
JJ: That’s right. Yeah. I often describe them as the bridge between invertebrates and invertebrate species in that they eat a lot of invertebrate species and they connect those up to birds and mammals and other things that we’re more familiar with and see more frequently. But yeah, a lot of people don’t realize how integral they are to our food webs and to our ecosystems and the world around us.
And one of the best ways I can use to describe that is here where I live in the Southern Appalachians and probably even up where you are, Margaret, salamanders are the most abundant vertebrate we have in the forest. So much so that the biomass, so if you took an acre of habitat and you weighed all the salamanders in that acre, it would outweigh all of the other vertebrates combined. So that includes things like bear and deer and things like that.
Margaret: Wow.
JJ: And so when you think about the impact that amount of mass has on our ecosystem and what they’re doing in terms of eating invertebrates and loosening soil and being food and prey items and that sort of thing, it’s really tremendous.
And then of course your favorite frogs are the same, very abundant, and they’re moving in and out of wetlands and they’re moving nutrients across the landscape and taking the nutrients that are available in wetlands and ponds when they’re tadpoles and transporting those out onto the landscape, and really acting as sort of transport for a lot of nutrients back into our forests and back into our backyards and gardens and those sorts of places.
Margaret: Not to mention charismatic beyond belief [laughter].
JJ: Of course. Yeah.
Margaret: So even though I’m one of those frog people—I’m definitely outed now [laughter]—I realized that in our initial phone call the other day that we never even really got deep into the topic of frogs, because you had me completely enchanted with some salamander tales—and that’s T-A-L-E-S, not T-A-I-L-S—and you just hinted at that and we’ll talk more about some salamanders in a minute.
But before we talk about specific ones, I had a taxonomy-ish question. The Conservancy is about both reptiles and amphibians, and I think in the past, both groups were more closely connected in the sort of tree of life sense by scientists than they are today. But I don’t know, even though a salamander looks to me more like a skink or a lizard perhaps than it does like a frog, appearances can be deceiving, yes? I mean, what’s a reptile versus an amphibian? Do you know what I mean?
JJ: Very much so.
Margaret: It’s not just on looks, right?
JJ: For sure. So we group those amphibians and reptiles now based on evolutionary history, and they’re actually very divergent from each other, and more closely related to other things. So for example, alligators and crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to any other reptiles. But they kind of got lumped together a long time ago just based on their features, so cold-blooded and that sort of thing. And that has just stuck with the field of herpetology and amphibians and reptiles. And we as Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy stick those together because they’re often overlooked and underrepresented in the conservation landscape. And so yeah, very, very different organisms.
And even salamanders or frogs: We estimate that salamanders and frogs diverged 300 million years ago or so.
Margaret: Wow.
JJ: So you’re talking about some really ancient lineages that we group together under very loose umbrellas of words like amphibians.
Margaret: Right. Well, so it’s not just me that found it a little confusing [laughter].
JJ: For sure. And other than their skin, they don’t really look alike. A frog is a completely different body plan than a salamander.
Margaret: Yes. I guess they’re both tetrapods, but so is a zebra. So where’s that going to get me? [Laughter.]
JJ: Exactly. Yeah.
Margaret: Yeah. So salamander stories: I mean, the one that’s familiar to people in the Eastern U.S., is it the Eastern newt or the Eastern salamander? What do we call the one that has a red eft stage?
JJ: The Eastern newt.
Margaret: Eastern newt. So I mean that alone, which is a familiar one—people have probably seen, met it or seen pictures of it: a bright reddish-orangey kind of color [below, at Margaret’s]. An incredible life story. So maybe we could start there.
JJ: Sure. Yeah. They’re really a great example of just how little we often understand about amphibians and reptiles and the natural world. We tend to simplify these things and think of them as a small animal, a small vertebrate, that maybe lives two years and has really a simple life.
But Eastern newts can live 15, 20 years. They go through complex life cycles. So they’re born in the water in an aquatic phase, and they have a larva stage, which is like a salamander version of a tadpole, where they might spend a few months in some climates upwards of a year in the water developing. They still have gills in that phase, like the well-known axolotls. And then they metamorphose and come out of those ponds into that eft stage. The best way to describe it is basically it’s an extended juvenile phase, where they sort of wander the landscape bright red and beautiful, and that’s where we encounter most of them.
And like a lot of juvenile stages, us as teenagers, they think they’re kind of invincible, and so they wander out in the open. And for the most part, things don’t mess with them because they’re pretty toxic to eat.
And so they get a little bravado about them and wander the landscape. But then once they reach sexual maturity five to seven years later, depending again on climates, then they’ll go back to an aquatic habitat and transform again into an adult newt. And that’s more of a green phase larger with, again, more of a paddled tail fitting for an aquatic environment [below; ARC photo by Emily Nolan]. And they can actually go back and forth. If a pond dries, they’ll transform more into a terrestrial phase again. And so it’s an incredible example of just how complex some of these life cycles are and how amazing the tools that evolution has given them to survive.
Margaret: And so they reproduce in the water, I mean, that’s where they are for their reproductive stage, you said, at sexual maturity and so forth. And I mean, I see in my backyard two water gardens that I dug a million years ago, I see them at that early or later stage. And it’s just incredibly fascinating because they don’t look like the red eft. They don’t look like that same creature. And yet I know that they are. I mean, it’s miraculous. And the fact that they have two aquatic phases, it’s like, wow, really? I don’t think there’s another animal that does that.
JJ: It’s amazing, too, in that it’s almost like they completely flip their color scheme. So when they’re GF stage, they’re bright red and they have little green dots and then they turn to adults and they turn green and then they have little sort of remnant red dots on them. So I think a lot of us, I guess, go through that where they completely change who they were as juveniles.
Margaret: Yeah, no, but they’re incredible. And the lifespan, the fact that they could live so long, I mean, it’s just incredible. And then there’s the spotted salamander. Again, I think it’s an Eastern species, eastern portion of the country, but larger, very distinctive. It’s spotted as it sounds. [Photo below from ARC by Jess Meck.]
JJ: Yeah. Another beautiful, striking salamander that’s dark black base with yellow spots all over it. And a lot of folks in the East, at least especially up in the North, get more familiar with these guys because they have such large migrations during the late winter, early spring, and they’ll cross roads and you see towns with spotted salamander festivals and that sort of thing.
But again, another amazing life history in that they spend the vast majority of the year completely underground. In fact, they belong to a family called the mole salamanders because they spend so much time underground.
And really their superpower, the amazing thing about them, is that they have this incredible symbiotic relationship with an algae. And so if you go out in a wetland or pond and you see green eggs, those are most likely spotted salamander eggs. And those algae, they grow on those eggs and are found nowhere else but in spotted salamander eggs. And they actually send tendrils down into the body of the salamander as they’re developing. And if you remove the algae, the salamander will still survive, but they’ll be much, much smaller and that lasts through their entire life. And if you remove the salamander, the algae actually dies, because it’s not getting the nutrients it needs. So it’s another incredible life history thing for a fairly common species that many of us have seen or at least heard of.
Margaret: And they move. I mean, I know many places, I mean those kind of big nights, is that what they call it in the spring when the conditions are moist and the right temperature and so forth? And do they move at that time like other salamanders do? Well, other amphibians do from, or do they have sort of a migratory pattern? You said they come from underground and so forth. How far away from the water is that underground?
JJ: It’s typically not very far. It can migrate a couple kilometers at most, but most salamanders in general don’t move very far, which is one of the problems they face is that we have fragmented the landscape so much that it makes it difficult for them to move across the landscape, because they don’t have the ability like a bird or a larger mammal to move across that landscape. And we see them so often in those cases because, in fact, we’ve fragmented the landscape. And so they’re making their living and they’re surviving as adults up in the uplands and they’re trying to get back to the wetlands. And so oftentimes we’ve put a road there and that’s where we see them is they’re moving from those uplands back to the wetlands.
Margaret: Right, right. You mentioned, again, that underground portion of the spotted salamander’s life. And I think a lot of us think amphibian and we think water, which is indeed part of its life. But even with frogs, aren’t some of them more terrestrial than—and maybe that’s the wrong word, but-
JJ: Very much so.
Margaret: They’re not all 100 percent aquatic all the time, are they?
JJ: No, not at all. In fact, one of the most common species in the Eastern U.S., and especially the Northeast, is the wood frog.
Margaret: Yes! Quacks like a duck up here. [Laughter.]
JJ: Correct. Aptly named because they go into the woods and they spend their time in the upland. And in fact, the majority of salamander species on earth have actually developed a direct developing egg. And so they don’t lay their eggs in water, they lay their eggs on land. And the aquatic phase for those guys actually happens inside the egg. So they develop their gills and everything just like an aquatic salamander, but they do it in the egg and they metamorphose before they come out of the egg. And there are several species of frogs worldwide that do that. We don’t have as many here in North America, but worldwide, that is something that happens as well.
Margaret: Right. I remember in, maybe it was around May or so in the spring in one of your newsletters, an issue of your newsletter, there was a project that you were describing in the Florida Panhandle, I believe, a salamander project. And you had a bit of a hiccup, because of drought conditions, in bringing these babies—I’m going to use a non-technical word—in bringing these “babies” to where you wanted to help to repopulate them or whatever because of drought, and you had to take some extraordinary measures. I thought that was a kind of interesting anecdote, and maybe you could just tell us the short version of that.
JJ: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for reading that and bringing that up. That’s a salamander species that’s near and dear to my heart and one of the most endangered salamander species in the United States and if not the world. It’s called the frosted flatwoods salamander [above, the frosted flatwoods salamander, and below, its aquatic stage; ARC photos by Rob Tiffin]. And it’s actually pretty closely related to the spotted salamander that we were just talking about. They do have that aquatic life stage and they do live in the uplands.
In their case, they live in sandy uplands and longleaf pine ridges, historic longleaf pine ridges, and they’ve been reduced to a tiny fraction of their original range. They’ve lost 99 percent of their range and 99 percent of their habitat. And so we do a lot of work to try to rebuild those populations, restore their habitat. And that was a case where we’re working a lot to headstart a lot of those eggs, which just means we’re trying to get them past their most vulnerable stage in the egg and in the small larvae.
And we take the eggs out. Our team literally crawls hands and knees through these wetlands and dry areas to try to find these eggs and then raise them in tanks. And we release them right as they’re about to metamorphose so that they kind of imprint on that wetland and will return there. But this year there was a problem: This was the driest year ever recorded in the panhandle of Florida.
And so I’m really proud of our team. They got creative. They didn’t let that stand in the way. We had over a thousand larvae to release, but no wetlands to release them in. And so the team just rolled up their sleeves and went to work and built some little wetlands in little tubs and things like that where-
Margaret: It was almost like kiddie pools submerged into the –
JJ: That’s right.
Margaret: It was like improv wetlands. It was amazing. [Above, release pens set up for the salamanders; ARC photo by Nicole Dahrouge.]
JJ: Thank you. Yeah, again, really proud of the team for that one. And it just shows the attitude we have, which is just we have to roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done to save some of these species that are just so in trouble that they’re at risk of going extinct in our lifetimes.
Margaret: So you have all this expertise, and you can take these kinds of measures and figure out who’s the most endangered and where they are and how to help and so forth. And I wonder if we try to translate some of that, distill a little bit of that expertise in the last few minutes here.
What about amphibians can we humans, especially gardeners who have a landscape that we’re managing presumably, be more conscious about? I mean, what are the things that… I mean, I know I feel blessed that not because I thought I was going to attract amphibians, but just because I wanted water in my landscape, I made these water gardens years ago, and they’ve proven to be the great attractant of every animal, from insects on up. So what are the things that we can do, be more conscious of, as I said?
JJ: Absolutely. Well, you’ve talked about it a lot on your show with other folks like Doug Tallamy. And the idea is the same, which is just that all of these, even our common amphibians and reptiles, have lost so much habitat that any habitat you can create for them is helpful, the bring the nature home idea. And for amphibians and reptiles, a lot of that comes down to pretty simple things like leaving leaves on the ground, keeping natural shelter in place. In this case, natural shelter is larger rocks and logs. They love rotting logs. So we see a log on the ground as something-
Margaret: Debris.
JJ: Right. Yeah. Really that’s the home for not just amphibians and reptiles, but a lot of invertebrates and everything, small mammals. And so just keeping that naturalness to your garden area and your landscape. And then absolutely what you were saying is just creating any kind of wetland habitat, especially fish-less wetland habitats that allow larval amphibians to survive and thrive.
We as a country from 1780 to 1980 destroyed 60 acres of wetlands an hour every hour for 200 years. And so you can imagine for anything that depends on a wetland, they’re out on the landscape just looking for anywhere to be able to make a living, to lay their eggs and survive basically. And so any help you can give to those creatures is a help on the landscape.
Margaret: And no chemicals, I think, because I would imagine these are extremely vulnerable creatures.
JJ: Absolutely. Especially amphibians, which in many cases breathe entirely through their skin, and in a lot of cases breathe a lot through their skin. So a lot of salamanders, for example, have completely lost their lungs. And so the real advantage for them is that they can breathe right across their skin. The disadvantage is that we’ve of course put a lot of things out there that they don’t want to be taking across their skin. And so absolutely limiting chemicals. Of course, everybody has an occasion or many of us have an occasion where you need to use those things sparingly, but sort of limiting their exposure.
Margaret: To be conscious. Yeah. Well, I’m just so glad… Like I said, I don’t remember how I found you, but I’m so glad, and I hope this will be the first of many conversations. Next we have to talk about frogs [laughter].
JJ: Of course. Yeah, I’d love that.
Margaret: And I’ll try not to anthropomorphize too much in that conversation [laughter], but thank you, JJ Apodaca, from the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. And I’ll give all the information about how people can find your website and the newsletter and so forth [below]. And I hope I’ll talk to you again soon. Thank you for making time today.
JJ: Great. Thanks again, Margaret. Great to talk to you.
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Aug. 3, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
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