UNC Asheville Professor of Biology Rebecca Hale Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Will Study the Behavior Patterns of Native Salamanders

By UNC Asheville

September 21^st, 2022

Rebecca Hale, Steve and Frosene Zeis Professor in Biology at UNC Asheville, spends a lot of time with salamanders. Whether following spotted salamanders at home in Western North Carolina, marbled salamanders in South Carolina, or ringed salamanders in Arkansas, the questions she asks are the same. These elusive animals spend a brief time of the year socializing at breeding ponds and she is trying to determine how they spend that time. What decisions do they make when seeking mates? How are these decisions related to their parenting strategies? And how do they differ between closely related species? Hale recently received a Mid-Career Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for $218,472 to begin answering these questions.

Hale considers that the females of most species do not actively engage in seeking mates and caring for offspring simultaneously—female mammals do not ovulate during pregnancy and nursing, and female birds do not brood eggs until all the eggs are laid, for example. There are well-studied ecologically driven mechanisms such as the constraints of time and energy that may explain the negative coupling of these behaviors.

UNC Asheville Professor of Biology Rebecca Hale Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Here’s where the three salamander species come in. Hale suspects that these species have different solutions to the problem of finding and selecting mates and that these differences are associated with their nesting behavior. Specifically, female marbled salamanders may cut out early from the mating scene in order to find a suitable nest site where they will spend the next months brooding their young. The other species lay eggs in the pond and then return to the forest the same night. These, and other differences, led Hale to predict that marbled salamanders mate with fewer males before laying eggs than spotted or ringed salamanders do.

With the support of this new NSF grant, Hale will develop the tools to test this hypothesis. The number of males a female has mated with can be estimated from her offspring, by determining how many different males father young in the brood. To do this, she will partner with Dr. Todd Pierson, Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University, to develop genetic tools to assign parentage. She will spend spring 2023 working in Pierson’s lab to identify regions of each species’ genome that are variable enough to be useful in assigning parents to each larvae. Once she develops the tools, she will compare parentage patterns of the three species. Then, she will use them to tease apart hypotheses for why females seek more than one mate to begin with.

Hale’s funding begins in 2023 and will last for three years, over which time she will study these species in their native habitats throughout the southeast. The grant will allow her to train students in these molecular techniques and provide them research opportunities both in the lab and the field.

LEARN MORE

Button Label

Q&A: HOW 3 UNCA STUDENTS’ FIELDWORK IS ADVANCING THE SCIENCES & SUPPORTING COMMUNITIES IN WESTERN NC

February 23^rd, 2026

Read

Finding Her Place in the Big Cheese

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

Read

MAHEC Internship Prepares UNC Asheville Students for Careers in Medicine

UNC Asheville Professor of Biology Rebecca Hale Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Will Study the Behavior Patterns of Native Salamanders

February 23^rd, 2026

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

January 26^th, 2026

Senior Chemistry Student Adam Wold Powers Meaningful Change in Sustainability Research

December 2^nd, 2025

An epic journey from UNC Asheville to the prestigious Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program

February 23rd, 2026

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

January 26th, 2026

Senior Chemistry Student Adam Wold Powers Meaningful Change in Sustainability Research

December 2nd, 2025

An epic journey from UNC Asheville to the prestigious Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program

February 23^rd, 2026

January 26^th, 2026

December 2^nd, 2025