One of the things I saw in the Nature Notes was that you spent some time at Oregon Caves your first summer.
The reason for going to Oregon Caves was to visit Bigelow Lakes with Don Farner. Do you know the Bigelow Lakes? Yes, sure you do. Well, there was and probably still is a population of Dicamptodon ensatus there in the Bigelow Lakes. That is the Pacific Coast giant salamander, as I’m sure you know. The population there in the lake was a neotenic population, which are salamanders that fail to metamorphose. The salamanders in this population had become enormously large without metamorphisis. Don knew about this population. He had apparently seen it on one of his trips there. He brought some thyroxine from his lab that summer he and I were working in the park. The idea was that these larvae would be treated with some solutions of thyroxine to see if they could be metamorphosed. You see the metamorphosis of an amphibian is determined by the thyroid gland and by thyroxine.
He and I made this trip to the Bigelow Lakes, and collected these animals, brought them back to Crater Lake, and treated them with thyroxine solutions. We were unable to metamorphose them completely. We were able to get certain metamporphic effects, like reduction of the external gills, along with some other types of characteristics. But we were never able to get them to completely metamorphose into the adult type of morphology. We figured that these salamanders had grown so long as larvae that they had developed a different type of physiology that made them resistant to this metamorphosing substance. I think that he and I went back there together at least one other time. I went back there on my own one other time, too.
At any point did you try to update the amphibian list? I know that Richard Bond had done some work in the mid-1930’s. Did it need updating by the early 1950’s because of an expansion proposal for Oregon Caves at that time?
Yes, that expansion is something that is mentioned in one of the “Nature Notes” articles by Marvin Wilson. No, we weren’t paying any attention to other types of salamanders around there. It was entirely an interest in this neotenic population.
I was sent over to Oregon Caves as one of my very first assignments after I arrived at Crater Lake. The idea was to put identification tags on the plants that were over there.
On the Cliff Nature Trail?
It must have been. That was my first contact with the Oregon Caves.
