Jesse Fusco, VMES
Ocean County
Second Place, Ocean County, Blue-spotted Salamander (c) Jesse Fusco
Blue Spotted Salamander
Hello, I am a Blue Spotted Salamander in the Passaic River Basin. I am going to explain who I am and the threats facing my species and I. My species is endangered and we need your help to survive.
First of all, I was born about 2 years ago. I believe the year my parents were mating the season only lasted two days, but it may have been up to three weeks long. Our species lays eggs in small vernal pools. Vernal pools have no outlets therefore predatory fish are not able to breed. We make sure vernal pools are a maximum of 600 feet from are burrows but I like them to be 100 feet away! When me and my 199 siblings were laid our parents, like many others scurried back to their burrows. After one month we hatched and began eating anything we could get our small little mouths on. But after three months I got a sense of taste. I began dining on tasty zooplankton! Although zooplanktons are_ tasty, I decided t9 start eating delicious insects! One last fact is that my smallest sibling is 3 Yz inches long but my largest is 5 Yz inches long.
Although I seem like a carefree salamander my species is in some hot water! We are endangered for many reasons. First of all, we are sensitive to water quality. Your species is polluting so much that some of our vernal pools are now useless to us. The vernal pool I was born has a house on it! Development destroyed my birthplace. Runoff water drowns us. Cars kill us with their tires. We also eat mosquitos and insects and you are killing off our food supply.
As you can see we are a species worth protecting because we help control the mosquito population. If you want to help protect us, stop developing on our habitat; do not send runoff into our vernal pools, and enough with the new highways. Stop sending methane and carbon into the atmosphere and stop mosquito and other pest control efforts.
With your help we can be saved! Simply do as I said and we will survive. I hope you learned more about us and will help protect us.
Written by: Jesse Fusco
VMES, Brick, NJ
Teacher: Miss Duddy