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Hello Twitter world! If you want to see something adorable (I’m very bias of course) my undergraduate research project, which was making “hotels” for salamanders was published. Read my thread to learn more!
Why a salamander hotel you ask? Well to begin, they have feelings and they also love a luxury experience. More importantly, they are cryptic and sometimes difficult to know how many species of salamanders are in the stream. They can also be adorably small and often missed.
Therefore, this “hotel” can be placed in a stream as an alternative to a visual encounter survey. They can sit in the stream and salamanders will colonize the apparatus so you can understand what species are present.
They are very easy to make, minimally destructive to the ecosystem, and can be used as a way to rapidly assess stream salamanders. They aren’t perfect- but there is good potential for those that study streams and stream salamanders.
Feel free to check out my paper and share with your friends! Oh and I forgot to mention, we named them “Maloney Salamander Hotels” because my advisor ( @mcewanlab) said men often name inventions after themselves, why can’t women 
https://bioone.org/journals/natural-areas-journal/volume-40/issue-4/043.040.0404/Development-of-a-New-Habitat-Mimicking-Tool-for-Assessing-Larval/10.3375/043.040.0404.short
https://bioone.org/journals/natural-areas-journal/volume-40/issue-4/043.040.0404/Development-of-a-New-Habitat-Mimicking-Tool-for-Assessing-Larval/10.3375/043.040.0404.short
If you made it this far, thanks for following along! I hope that this little hotel will maybe help you research or passion someday.
