Friend brought this by for me to photograph it. He found it in some lumber at work along with a male that later died. Is a Western Black Widow the only possibility for this?
This salamander was found during the day under a rotten log in a forested area in eastern Tennessee.
My ecology students found a few of these in their butterfly nets during a grasshopper mark-recapture lab. The area is an unmowed section of campus green space that was seeded with native grassland herbs, predominantly Rudbeckia.
Photo by Elvira Muniz