958, snow was in isolated drifts and the
centers of the logs were still icy. On May 31, and June 22, 1958, there
was no ice anywhere, but no salamanders were evident. Late June is,
however, around the earliest time that _A. hardii_ emerges (Taylor,
1941).

Food and Foraging Behavior

We identified the contents of stomachs from 16 salamanders collected in
1956 and 1957; the items found in them are listed in Table 1. It is not
likely that this list is complete for prey species because _A. hardii_
eats a variety of food and probably takes prey almost indiscriminately
if it is of appropriate size. The kind of food most frequently eaten
was ants; they comprised almost 40 per cent of the total items.
Nevertheless, less than half the stomachs contained ants; this may mean
that salamanders do not make an effort to take ants over any other prey.
Such foraging behavior would result in random capture of ants, and it is
noteworthy that the frequency distribution of ants in stomachs suggests
a Poisson distribution, a mathematical description of one kind of random
distribution.

Table 1.--Numbers of Food Items Found in Stomachs of 16 Specimens
of Aneides hardii

=================================+==========+===========+=============
| | Percentage| Number of
|Individual| of total | stomachs in
Items |animals | (154) | which found
| |individuals|
---------------------------------|----------|-----------|-------------
Mollusca | | |
_Pupilla muscorum_ } | | |
_Gastrocapta_ sp. } | 3 | 1.9% } | 4
_Vallonia pulchella?_ | 4 | 2.5 } |
| | |
Arthropoda | | |
Arachnoida | | |
Arachnida | 15 | 9.7 | 9
Acarina | 13 | 8.4 | 3
| | |
Insecta | | |
Orthoptera (_Ceuthophilus_)| 2 | 1.3 | 2
Hemiptera | 1 | 0.6 | 1
Coleoptera | | |
adults (carabids a