The University of Alabama is home to thousands of animal species, and the state of Alabama is the most biodiverse freshwater habitat in the modern world.
The app iNaturalist currently has a project called the “University of Alabama Campus Biodiversity Survey,” where users can track any plant or animal they observe on campus. There are over 1,000 unique species that have been recorded since the project’s beginning in 2016.
John Friel, the director of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, started the campus’ iNaturalist project and is one of its top contributors. Users like Friel can create projects themselves, and there are many other projects on the app.
Friel said that on a campus with over 40,000 students, “95-plus percent of them are glued to their devices as they’re walking between classes.”
“While a device can be a distraction for you, it can also be a tool,” Friel said.
All someone has to do to log a species on iNaturalist is take a picture of it, and the app will identify the animal in the picture as well as mark the location it was taken.
Friel noted that the survey is “a very incomplete list” and “very biased towards animals,” but he said it does a good job showcasing animals many wouldn’t think live on campus.
Friel said he has spotted foxes, opossums and deer during his time on campus, many of which he has logged on the app.
“We have a very large population of gray squirrels and the birds of prey that really focus on them,” Friel said.
The University has a large number of hawks, as they are predators to the campus’s many eastern gray squirrels. There are 137 observations of eastern gray squirrels on the iNaturalist project, double as many as the next animal, the Asian lady beetle, with 63.
Friel said hawks can be spotted on or near the Quad, biding their time to hunt their prey.
Birds in particular are very popular on the app. The University has a thriving bird population, as well as many birding students to appreciate it.
For Kevin Shaw, a graduate student in biology, his passion for birding came before he moved to campus, deriving from his mom’s love for birds and his love for the California gnatcatchers at his home in southern California — not quite the birds students will find at the University.
“Since it [campus] is pretty manicured, you have a lot of grassy spaces, and some of the more urban-adapted species will favor these areas,” Shaw said. “So mockingbirds, cardinals, brown thrashers [are common].”
Shaw said more natural woodland areas would result in an increase in native species, while insecticides, which are often used throughout campus greenery, erase a major food source for many birds.
The University’s arboretum is a generally unbothered 60-acre plot of nature that is host to over 150 species of birds.
On the website eBird, a similar project to iNaturalist with a focus on fowls, over 157 birds have been spotted at the arboretum dating back to 2013, many of which Shaw logged himself. That’s 56 more than the current 101 birds spotted on the main campus eBird page, despite the campus’s 1400-acre advantage.
Currently, more uncommon birds can be spotted as well, on their migration to Central and South America from August through November, as they stop in the Southeast before flying across the Gulf of Mexico. The University’s arboretum is a perfect spot for the migrating birds among the large city habitat, Shaw said, adding that he has spotted several migratory birds, such as swamp sparrows, hermit thrushes and virginia rails on campus.
Some birds choose not to make the Gulf crossing. As a result, the University is also home to many “winter birds,” as Shaw called them, that specialize in surviving in the cold, such as swamp sparrows and the ruby- and golden-crowned kinglets.
The University has an impressive bird population, but it pales in comparison to the biodiversity present in the campus and the state’s freshwater.
“For freshwater biodiversity, we [the state of Alabama] are pretty much unmatched,” said Worth Pugh, UA coordinator of zoological collections. Pugh manages the University’s century-old collection of fish, reptiles, amphibians, crayfish and mussels.
“Our campus touches the Black Warrior River, so we might as well claim it,” Pugh said. “There are several different species that only occur in the Black Warrior River, where we are in Tuscaloosa.”
Campus fish hotspots like Marr’s Spring are all tributaries of the Black Warrior and get many of their animals from the river. Mussels, fish, amphibians and even a rare alligator, Pugh said, can be found in the river and its many tributaries, and Alabama also boasts the most diverse turtle population in the world.
Many of these animals, however, are in desperate trouble due to man-made effects on the river.
Pugh said the biggest difference between the state of the Black Warrior River now and pre-urbanization was that “your feet could touch the bottom.”
The Black Warrior River currently stands around 30 feet by Pugh’s estimations.
Dams built along the river have made the previously shallow, fast-flowing and diversely laid-out river into a still, homogenous, deep reservoir. Animals would previously adapt their biology to the parts of the river they inhabited, whether it be the rockier bottoms, the high-speed streams, or the calmer tributaries and offshoots. Now, they’re dying off in large numbers.
An example of this are mussels, a pride of Alabama’s biodiversity that have had trouble repopulating. Mussels repopulate by attaching small, single-cell larvae to fish, who swim upstream where eventually the mussels will drop off and begin forming. The increase in dams has made fish unable to swim upstream as easily, leading to a decrease in the populations of both species.
To preserve the river’s and the state’s biodiversity, Pugh suggested man-made “fish tunnels” within the dams, as tearing down dams is unrealistic in most situations. These passages would remove the barriers towards fish’s migration that dams currently pose while still maintaining the advantages of the dam.
These species that many may not think much about — like mussels, amphibians and smaller fish — are important because they are “biological indicators,” Pugh said.
These animals’ bodies and skin reflect the quality of their habitat, a habitat students share with them.
“They are what tell us we’re messing up our water. And we drink the water. I don’t know about you, but I like clean water,” Pugh said. “If they’re healthy, that means we’re gonna be healthy.”
