Braiding Sweetgrass

strode purposefully into the water and disappeared. My daughter
was disappointed, expecting to see them loitering on the beach or
doing belly flops into the pool. She searched the water’s surface
with her flashlight, wanting to see what happened next, but there
were only dappled leaves on the bottom of the pool, patches of light
and dark. Nothing to see—until we realized that the patches of light
and dark were not leaves at all, but the black and yellow spots of
dozens of salamanders. Everywhere the light stopped there were
salamanders, the bottom of the pool a blanket of animals. And they
were moving, swirling about each other like a room full of dancers.
Compared to their ponderous movement on land, they were fleet in
the water, swimming as gracefully as seals. One flick of the tail and
they were gone from the circle of light.
The glassy surface of the pond was suddenly broken from below,
like the upwelling of a surging spring, and the water started to churn
as they moved together in a roiling crowd, yellow spots flashing. We
stood in amazed witness to their mating ritual, a congress of
salamanders. As many as fifty males and females danced and
swirled together, a rapturous celebration after a long year of
solitary, celibate existence eating bugs under a log. Bubbles rose
from the bottom of the pond like champagne.
Unlike most amphibians, Ambystoma maculata does not spill its
eggs and sperm freely into the water for a frenzy of mass
fertilization. The species has evolved a more probable scheme to
ensure the meeting of egg and sperm. Males break away from the
dancing swarm, take a gulp of air, and swim for the bottom of the
pond, where they release a glistening spermatophore—a gelatinous
sac of sperm with a stalk to attach it to a twig or a leaf. The
females then leave the dance and seek out the quarter-inch sacs,
which hover like shiny Mylar balloons bobbing in the water. They