When herpetologist Mark Mandica’s thirteen-year-old son peered into an enclosure of frosted flatwoods salamanders in late December 2021 and said, “Dad, there’s eggs in there,” Mandica didn’t believe him. But on closer examination, Mandica spotted the jellylike orbs, attached to blades of grass. “We were overjoyed,” Mandica recalls. “We stood in the dark, hugging, because we’d been working toward this for a decade.”
Back then, the little-known, little-studied amphibian—once abundant in longleaf pine ecosystems—was nose-diving to extinction. And Mandica,
