 "Photo: Jason Sweeten")
At about 5 a.m. every day, the first swimmers show up at the gates of Barton Springs Pool to start their day. Laurie Dries shows up a couple hours later to look after Barton Springs' other native species: the endangered Barton Springs Salamander.
As early bird Austinites swim and do yoga on the grassy hill around the Barton Springs Pool, Dries spends her mornings doing a series of visual checks to make sure the salamander's environments are doing fine - first the pool and then two other sites at Zilker Park where the Barton Springs salamander is found.
"Trash, and contaminants - if something has been tossed in there, weird smells, something that kind of suggests there might be something wrong. And you look and see if there's any dead salamanders, but that's very rare. Things deteriorate quickly," she said.
Dries works with salamanders as an environmental scientist for the city's Watershed Protection Project, which she translates to mean she manages and fosters the recovery of the wild population of the Barton Springs salamander. The job forces her to spend a lot of time at the springs, a part of her job she said she doesn't mind, but which has taken away some of her joy in swimming at the springs for fun.
The salamander
Once she has scanned the main pool, Dries walks over and unlocks a chain link fence near the Zilker Zepher. She goes down a series of concrete steps to a shallow recessed pool that is actually another spring known as Eliza Springs, the site of the city's biggest success protecting the endangered salamander.
The Barton Springs salamander and others like it all over Central Texas are becoming endangered because of the high volume of urban development going on, Dries said. The Barton Springs salamander was declared an endangered species under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1997, according to the City of Austin Web site.
Though the Barton Springs Pool is the largest salamander habitat in square footage, it has the smallest population of salamanders, and they are rarely seen, because they live generally 11 to 17 feet below the surface, she said. In their other habitats at Zilker Park, the Eliza Springs and the Sunken Garden Springs, the salamanders live under rocks in shallow waters, where a steady flow of water is necessary to help them breathe.
One of the most important factors in ensuring the continuation of the species is keeping the water flowing and keeping debris down. The salamander breathes through its skin in a passive process, Dries said, where they sit under the rock and allow the flowing water to diffuse the maximum amount of oxygen inside.
"They never acquire lungs. They breathe through their skin, which is pretty cool, pretty wild," she said. "What is important about understanding the evolutionary groups is that it's not just a salamander. What it more specifically is is [a] stream salamander as opposed to a pond salamander. So looking at that gives some insight into what kind of habitat is likely to be the best for these animals to reproduce and survive."
'So what?'
There are three members on the city's team working with the salamander, one who works with the salamanders in captivity and a part-time worker to help Dries with the cleaning, maintenance and management required by the Endangered Species Act. Once a month, Dries and her colleagues go out to the three salamander sites at Zilker Park and hand count the number of salamanders at each location. Eliza Springs has been the test site for most of the city's improvements and has seen the greatest increase in the salamander population. At some point in its history, Dries said, a circular plate of concrete was put over the Eliza Springs. Essentially, it became a pond and the flowing water salamanders need was diminished.
Most of the restoration in Eliza Springs involved increasing the flow of water and clearing and restructuring rock formations and the amount of sediment in the pond.
"[Eliza Springs] was once a pond, and there were very few salamanders," Dries said. "From 1998 to 2002, the most salamanders we'd see in this area in a monthly survey was 12. That's very small. As a population of a species goes, 12 is extinct, functionally."
But within six months of starting the restructuring, she said the numbers started to increase. The average number of salamanders Dries finds on her monthly surveys has increased from 12 to a stable 400 in just couple of years.
Dries said the cleanliness of the water for the salamander has greater implications for people.
"If you ask people, it's like, 'Well, why should I care? I don't care if the salamander's there,'" Dries said. "Well, they're more sensitive to the water. They're living in it, it's going through their skin. They're more sensitive to the water than us. 'So what?' You drink this water! It does matter. This is water. You can't recreate water."
'This is our chance'
The city is translating its success in Eliza Springs to the Barton Springs Pool Master Plan the city council commissioned early this year, allotting a half million dollars per year for improvements to the pool, Dries said.
"Some of that's buildings, electricity, structures, but there's a big chunk of it that has to do with changing the flow regime in the pool so it's more stream like," she said.
With the Barton Springs Pool, the goal is to make everything work similar to Eliza Springs by enhancing the amount of control the city has over the flow in the spring.
Though improvements for the salamander are a part of the Barton Springs Pool Master Plan, they are a long way off because of how much has to be considered, Dries said.
"How many holes can you put in the dam before it falls down and you need a new one? Is it cheaper to build a new one? The one that's there has been there since 1929, 1930. It's old. We've learned a lot since then," she said.
Save Our Springs Alliance supports the master plan and the work Dries is doing but has some reservations.
"Right now, the plan is pretty vague. So we have asked that part of the plan include improvements to the flow of water in Barton Springs, and I think we are pretty much in agreement with Laurie and the city about that," said alliance spokesman Colin Clark.
Dries said she thinks it will take about five years to decide how to gain control of the water flow.
"It's a very long term thing, but this is our chance. We're not going to get another chance to do this in probably another hundred years. It's worth it to get it right," she said.
Outdoor biologist
In order to educate people about the salamander, the city fosters programs for kids and classes at the springs. In addition, Dries said they hold event days, such as Austin Nature Day, when people can come out and see the sites and the salamanders up close.
"When you do that, when you see something and get an idea of what it really lives in, it gives most people a better visual idea of what does an aquifer do and what's out here and how precious it is," said Dries.
Dries said knowing how good the habitat is for the salamander shows how good it is for other animals, which will help keep the habitat stable for the future.
"If a habitat naturally has a lot of different species in it, you would hope that it would be that way. You can't just focus on the salamander, because that won't be stable."
The goal is for the population to be stable for at least a hundred years, and the less human management they need, the better. Because in the wild, they don't really need us, she said.
Dries also prefers being in the wild to being in an office. She said when she was doing her post-doctoral research on fruit flies she discovered that difference from her colleagues: that she wanted to be an 'outdoor biologist.'
"I was always the person saying, lets go out to the vineyard and collect some flies in the wild," she said. "They'd just look at me like, 'Oh, give me a break.'"
Sunken garden
After she has finished surveying the Eliza Springs, Dries has one more site to check, the Sunken Garden. But before she moves on, she does one more thing.
"I like to come down and look at a salamander, because it makes me feel good," she said.
The Sunken Garden site where Dries goes next is tucked on the far side of the springs near the baseball fields. Sunken Garden is halfway between what Eliza was and what Eliza is, Dries said, and the city is working to get Sunken Garden to the environmental level Eliza is at.
What the city is doing at Sunken Gardens and the other sites is not restoring the habitat, but reconstructing it, Dries said. The salamanders and humans have been living together for about a hundred years, and it would be unreasonable to expect to completely restore it and infeasible to get people out of the Barton Springs environment.
"Change happens slowly in animals. and it happens over lifetimes - multiple lifetimes - generations and generations," Dries said. "So changing something really quickly, there is a lot of risk of it being detrimental in the short term. And when you don't have that many animals to begin with, that risk is a little too much to take."
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