The next day we headed towards south east Mississippi and stopped at a river in our target drainage. Unfortunately, no waterdogs. We drove to a neighboring county where several cited locality creeks were located and found two more creeks that looked promising, but still no luck. Finally, we headed toward the Coastal River Drainage. The area we surveyed wasn’t too deep and there were a few clumps of leaf packs. We started dip netting through the packs. Finally- the first waterdog! It was a hatchling. We continued dip netting and found a second one, this time a year-ling. After about 20 minutes of dip netting we found a sub-adult! We were happy to have located waterdogs.
We wrapped up and headed toward Mobile, AL for the night. We stayed at a hotel that had a resident population of Mediterranean House Geckos. Mediterranean House Geckos are a non-native species, but due to their choice of habitat, they don’t likely compete with native lizards. We found six geckos in an hour, and then it was off to bed!