The fate of a critically endangered salamander known to exist only in the Florida Panhandle lies within a laboratory at the San Antonio Zoo.

Danté Fenolio, vice president of conservation and research at the zoo, has been working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a decade to save the reticulated flatwoods salamander.

It’s a story that reaches into Fenolio’s childhood in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, hinges on an article he read by chance about a frog, and is possible because of support from the zoo and the Air Force.

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Fenolio and others credit the Air Force with a commitment to protecting the salamander population and preserving its habitat. And the zoo, with a fierce commitment to conservation and protection of endangered species, took on the project that Fenolio had started in Atlanta with no outside financial assistance. He and his staff are working long term on the salamander project in a zoo lab, where scientists care for the specimens and have created an environment that mirrors their habitat.

If there’s a successful conclusion to the effort, it will bring about a massive uptick in the population of the salamander — and its removal from the federal endangered species list — and will mostly likely result from discoveries made within the zoo’s lab that allow scientists to breed the amphibian in captivity, a goal that has eluded researchers.

The progress thus far — successfully hatching and maturing specimens from eggs collected in the wild — stems in part from a discovery Fenolio made during his childhood.

“I spent a lot of time out in the woods. One of the things I was curious about was how to gather salamander eggs,” he said. “I learned very quickly that if you move the eggs, a lot of times they don’t hatch.”

He cut a divot from beneath the eggs, excavating the surrounding earth. The eggs remained viable and they hatched.

Decades later, after earning a Ph.D. in biology — and writing a dissertation titled “Addressing Amphibian Decline Through the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan” — Fenolio received a phone call from Harold Mitchell, an ecologist with Fish and Wildlife who’d recently inherited the agency’s flatwoods salamander protection program.

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Mitchell was struggling to collect eggs and successfully hatch salamanders in captivity, said Fenolio, who at the time was an amphibian conservation scientist at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Fenolio drove to Eglin AFB in the Florida Panhandle, where the last known populations of the salamanders live, to lend a hand. He immediately noticed that team was collecting eggs directly — without scooping up the earth beneath them.

When the team switched to Fenolio’s method of cutting out divots, its success rate for hatching eggs in the lab skyrocketed. Mitchell knew Fenolio had expertise in amphibian life, but he wasn’t aware that the scientist had developed a successful method of collecting eggs as a youngster.

The struggles to grow the population of the salamander, known scientifically as Ambystoma bishopi, didn’t end when eggs began to hatch in the lab. After hatching, the salamanders were short-lived. They’d seemed to be OK, then would inexplicably turn black, dry out and die.

Fenolio sent samples to labs all over the globe for testing. No one found any bacteria, virus, disease, fungus or other reason for the deaths.

Fenolio came across an academic journal with a paper about a particular species of frog that had suffered a similar plague — a blackening and drying of the skin, followed by a quick demise. The solution was increasing their vitamin A.

Fenolio got permission from Mitchell to give vitamin A to the salamanders.

“It turns out that this salamander is just difficult across the board,” Fenolio said. “They have really weird nutritional needs. We don’t know why, but they need a lot of vitamin A in their diet.”

His lab cultures tiny white worms that eat bread covered in vitamin A. Those worms are fed to the salamanders, and with the boost in Vitamin A, they’re surviving in captivity.

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Much remains a mystery about the reticulated flatwoods salamander, which is black and has a frosty silver or white pattern on its body. They spend 99 percent of their lives underground, Fenolio said, and very little is known about the biology or ecology of their subterranean lives.

The females emerge once a year, just before the rainy season, to lay their eggs in low-lying areas, where the eggs hatch and larvae develop.

They begin their lives hatching from eggs smaller than a pea and can grow to be nearly 6 inches long. They start life with gills and tail fins before metamorphosing, losing those features and leaving the water to spend the remainder of their lives, which could be a quarter-century, underground.

The salamanders have faced a loss of habitat and appear to have been hit hard by climate change.

Citing a U.S. Geological Survey study of rainfall and temperature trends in the states where the salamander once thrived, Mitchell said the comparison between 1900-1910 and 2000-2010 is “shocking.”

The climate data shows that the region is significantly hotter and drier than it used to be. That’s cut the salamanders’ annual breeding season almost in half, Mitchell said.

Fenolio added that it’s more common for the salamanders to lay eggs ahead of an expected rainy season that never arrives.

In the wild, survival rates for the salamander are extremely low.

“The chances of any given salamander to crawl out of the pond is about 4 percent,” Mitchell said.

His team in Florida is working on “head starting” larvae, but it’s an expensive, laborious process that requires capturing young salamanders once they’ve grown large enough to trap but haven’t been eaten by predators. The scientists place no more than a dozen at a time in 250-gallon troughs designed to mimic their natural habitat.

The scientists are able to control water quality and protect the salamanders from becoming another creature’s meal. They they’re released just before they metamorphose into their terrestrial forms.

There’s a much higher success rate — about 85 percent — but it’s hard to do such work in large numbers.

Fenolio and his team also are trying to crack the code of how to prompt captive adults to reproduce. The ultimate goal is to breed the salamanders in captivity — in large numbers — and repopulate them in the wild.

Just as important, Mitchell said, is to continue to house the salamanders in a bio-secure lab. There are substantial concerns that the existing wild population in Florida could be wiped out by a prolonged drought or a single hurricane. And with the habitat’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and potential for rising sea levels driven by climate change, chances are greater that a major storm could push salt water into the fresh water ponds and low-lying areas where the salamanders lay eggs and live, poisoning them.

Fenolio and Mitchell say protecting the salamander is an important endeavor. For Mitchell, the salamanders are a brick in a wall of ecologically diversity. He tells people that if too many of those bricks are removed, the wall collapses — with profound consequences for the environment, agriculture and the economy.

Fenolio says future generations’ existence depend on today’s biodiversity. Pointing to amphibians, Fenolio said they’ve evolved to create skin toxins that kill bacteria. More than three-quarters of the medicines in use today are derived from Earth’s biodiversity, he said.

“It’s where our medicines come from,” he said. “So even if you don’t care about the environment, you should care about biodiversity.”

Josh Baugh covers environmental issues in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jbaugh@express-news.net | Twitter: @jbaugh