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Abstract
Photographic identification is an emerging method for recognising wild animals. This harmless methodology allows researchers to identify “naturally marked” individuals and therefore study their specific ecology and behaviour. However, before incurring potential data loss, it is recommended to test the methodology on the target species and evaluate the pros and cons. We assessed the reliability of photographic identification in adult Hydromantes salamanders from three species. Specifically, we assessed whether the dorsal pattern of adult salamanders changed over time, thus evaluating its potential use as a reliable marking methodology. We used capture-mark-recapture and controlled conditions (i.e. individuals kept in fauna boxes) to evaluate potential changes in the dorsal pattern of Hydromantes through time. We did not observe any change in the dorsal pattern in the three species during the study period. Photographic identification might be a useful marking technique for these endangered species. However, these animals are usually found in environments generally lacking light and thus, researchers must be careful in setting up proper light conditions to produce suitable pictures for individual identification of Hydromantes.
Highlights
Photographic identification of wild animals is gaining popularity amongst researchers conducting studies on single individuals (Salvidio et al 1994; Sharifi and Afroosheh 2014) and population dynamics (Martin-Smith 2011; Morrison et al 2011)
We combined photographic identification with two other methods to independently ascertain the identity of individual salamanders: i) Individuals were marked with Visual Implant Alpha tags or Visual Implant Elastomers, methodologies providing unequivocal salamander identification (Lunghi and Veith 2017; Lunghi and Bruni 2018); ii) Salamanders were kept individually in fauna boxes and regularly photographed for several months
We focused only on the dorsal pattern of adults as, in juveniles, it changes throughout development (Lanza et al 2006; Ambrogio and Mezzadri 2017)
Summary
Photographic identification of wild animals is gaining popularity amongst researchers conducting studies on single individuals (e.g. home range, migration) (Salvidio et al 1994; Sharifi and Afroosheh 2014) and population dynamics (Martin-Smith 2011; Morrison et al 2011). Animals must be handled to get appropriate pictures, which may cause considerable stress depending on the handling time (Lunghi et al 2016; Samimi et al 2016; but see Bradley and Eason 2018)
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