Rising from the Ashes

Though their communities were demolished by massive floods of debris, the recovering survivors are gradually moving back to their homes, welcoming new immigrants and, actually, thriving. Residents of tsunami-torn Indonesia? Hurricane Katrina evacuees?

No, they’re the plucky rough-skinned newts of Mount St. Helens’ timber-strewn blowdown zone, which have mingled with wayfarers from afar to replenish their genetic diversity. Twenty-six years ago, their mountain home, located near the state of Washington’s southwestern border, erupted in a mushroom-shaped plume of ash that rose thousands of feet skyward and spewed embers and rock fragments over nearly 230 square miles of forest.

 

Using newt populations from unaffected areas south of the volcano as a genetic reference, Utah State University doctoral researcher Kristin Bakkegard sought to find out how the St. Helens natives, known as Taricha granulosa, are faring.

 

Very well, thank you.

 

“I wanted to compare and contrast the genetics of the survivors’ descendants, the colonists and those populations untouched by the disaster,” says Bakkegard, who entered USU’s biology program as a Willard L. Eccles Graduate Fellow in 2001. “My hunch was that surviving and newly established communities farthest from source populations of immigrants would be less genetically diverse than the others, but that wasn’t the case.”

 

The more genetically heterogeneous a species, Bakkegard explains, the better its chances for survival.

 

The fleet-footed newt, says Bakkegard, moves faster and farther than anticipated. Some intrepid pilgrims, scientists discovered, traveled more than three miles over rugged, moon-like terrain to areas inhabited by eruption veterans.

 

Bakkegard’s study, which she started more than two years ago with encouragement from USU Professors Edmund “Butch” Brodie and Mike Pfrender, is thought to be the first genetic study of the impact of the Mount St. Helens eruption on amphibians. Worldwide, just a handful of studies emphasize the significance of ecological processes on the genetics of recolonization following a volcanic eruption.

 

Her work, which included two summers of field collection while camping in her truck, was lauded at the July annual meeting of the American Society of Icthyologists and Herpetologists in New Orleans. Bakkegard received the Storer Herpetology Award for the best student poster.

 

“Few studies are available that have examined amphibian response to habitat destruction,” she says. “Some of the results were contrary to expectations, which strongly suggest that each species responds differently.” 

 

Other USU researchers who presented posters, papers and talks at the ASIH meeting included Brodie, Michael Edgehouse, PhD student; Chris Feldman, PhD student; Joseph Mendelson, adjunct professor and Amanda Mortensen, undergraduate, along with USU alums Daniel Mulcahy and Becky Williams.

 

From here, Bakkegard plans to investigate the life history of another species of salamanders, called Ambystoma gracile, that also inhabits the St. Helens area but leads a less nomadic lifestyle than the rough-skinned newt. “This species rarely leaves its pond after maturity, so I expect to see different results,” she says.

 

A commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves, Bakkegard interrupts her research each month to fulfill duties in Fort Worth, Texas, where she leads a 103-member mobile inshore undersea warfare unit. She’s served two tours in Kuwait, first in 1998 when Saddam Hussein threatened to invade the tiny Arab nation, and again in 2004 for Operation Enduring Freedom/Iraqi Freedom, when her unit was called up to provide harbor security at Kuwait Navy Base and for the cargo port of Ash Shuabah.

 

Bakkegard, who is a graduate of the Naval Academy and served 10 years on active duty before joining the reserves, sees academia and the military as two separate worlds but says skills acquired in each are transferable. “The two are analogous. You learn to take initiative and break big projects into manageable pieces to get them done on time,” she says. “The difference is that, in the military, you have a lot more people depending on you and people holler at you when you don’t get things done.”

 

 

Contact: Kristin Bakkegard, 435-770-0643, kbakkegard@biology.usu.edu