Dredging for pollywogs

Having a bottom 2 1/2 x 3 feet and a height of 5" allows one to catch all manner of herps, fish, and aquatic insects. The other day Mike and John came by and borrowed my Goin Dredge (see photo above) to try their luck finding small fish, aquatic salamanders and tadpoles in some of our local shallow (ankle to chest deep are fine, but waist deep seems to be preferred) waters. They had a productive day, one that hearkened me back to the days when Patti and I spent time dredging and photographing the results. To use the dredge one wades out to floating masses of aquatic vegetation (water hyacinths being among the better plant types) slides the dredge beneath the root masses, lift the contained vegetative mass to the surface and sort through the roots and stems. Among other things, in this way Patti and I found two-toed amphiuma, 3 species of siren including our first Everglades dwarf siren, dwarf salamanders, river frog tadpoles, mud snakes, striped crayfish snakes, various water snakes, an occasional small cottonmouth, and many interesting fish and invertebrates. We’d return home hours later, soaked, mud-covered, and satisfied. Maybe it’s time to do this again!

Striped swamp snakes, Liodytes alleni, are often found among floating vegetation.

From snakes to pollywogs, this river frog, Rana heckscheri, pollywog is just one of the many species found while dredging.