Let’s Not Let This Slip Through Our Fingers
The Earth is losing many of its amphibians, so my family and I were thrilled to find this salamander atop Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern United States. We held it only for a moment with chemical free hands, and then placed it back into the patch of moss where my son had spotted it. It crawled back under the undergrowth, until its clipped tail was no longer visible, going about its day living its best life munching bugs and slugs in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Salamanders are living fossils of the tetrapods we descended from, for it was our amphibian ancestors who first stepped out of the ocean and brought the vertebrates to land 390 million years ago. Today, amphibians remain important insectivores in our ecosystems, but unfortunately they are disappearing at an alarming rate and might be lost to Earth forever. If this happens, it will threaten our own outlook for survival as we navigate through a world with more pests causing more crop loss and spreading more disease.
I wish I could tell you to kiss a frog and it would make this problem magically disappear, but this nonconsensual smooch won’t help. We are living through a time where we can witness how the loss of the world’s biodiversity is causing the material cycles in our ecosystems to fail, building up greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and acidic compounds in our soil. Our…