 "Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia.org")
 "Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia.org")
The sun is slowly setting in the west on a beautiful, late-summer day at Pulaski Park - a placid, fresh-water lake and one of my favorite New England swimming holes. After hours of swimming and lunch at the hot dog stand, I head off into the surrounding pine forest with my cousin, Josh, and my sister, Amy.
We are on a mission, a hunt, and we sweep through the pine needles on the forest floor, turning over rocks in search of our prey.
Some of the granite stones are so large that it takes all three of us to lift them and, as they slowly roll over, beetles and pill bugs scurry away from the light. There, in the dark soil sits the object of our quest: It's a salamander, a Red-spotted newt, but to us, it's a miniature dragon - a thing of legend and great interest to any inquisitive kid wandering through the New England woodlands.
We have just succeeded in carefully scooping our dragon into a Tupperware container, taking great care not to damage its delicate body. Josh immediately claims it as his own, as it was his idea to lift this particular boulder, and the container belongs to his mom. After several minutes of heated argument, Amy and I concede defeat.
But not for long. While Josh is busy coveting his trophy, Amy and I decide to flip an adjacent, much smaller stone and, in doing so, trump Josh's brief victory.of
We have found a Blue-spotted salamander.
At the end of the day, after much scrutiny and several rounds of show and tell, our parents convince us that, having studied and enjoyed our new friends, it's best to return them to the wild to live out their lives and possibly be discovered by other kids.
Grudgingly, we say goodbye and head home - rather pleased with ourselves. It was a good hunt.
This is one of my favorite childhood memories, and it replays in my mind as a compilation of long-lost days of summer too numerous to count.
Those summer afternoons may not be the only things long lost.
The best and brightest minds of the scientific community are warning that, unless something is done immediately, salamanders - in fact, all amphibians, including frogs, toads and newts - will suffer a mass extinction in the near future.
And it should not surprise anyone that it's the fault of humankind.
It's our fault.
"For the first time in modern history, because of the way that humans are impacting our natural world, we're facing the extinction of an entire class of organisms," said Claude Gascon, a Conservation International herpetologist, in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune. "This is not the extinction of just a panda or a rhino; it's a whole class of organisms. Certainly if it were impacting mammals, we would be taking this a lot more seriously."
Human impact - in the form of water and air pollution, habitat destruction and global warming - is devastating amphibian populations across the planet. As people are slow to change their habits, the chain of events presently in motion may prove to be irreversible, leaving only a "damage control" approach for saving more than 5,700 amphibian species.
Gascon is one of 50 scientists who recently made a plea to humanity published in Science, and who are calling for a five-year, $400 million attempt to gather threatened amphibians and keep them in regional breeding and research centers, zoos and universities around the world.
The scientists also caution that extinction of an entire class of animals could have disastrous ramifications on Earth's ecosystems.
In ecology, some species are known as "keystone species." Just as the keystones of ancient Roman archways kept the arches from collapsing, certain species prevent the ecological systems they inhabit from falling into disarray.
Amphibians are predators that eat a variety of insects; in turn, they are a food source for many other animals. Thus, it's fair to say that certain amphibian species are keystone species and to remove them from the system could simultaneously cause a marked increase in their prey insects and a sharp decrease in their predators' populations.
Both of these possibilities are ecological disasters and could lead to endangering numerous other species.
Time will tell.
In the meantime, perhaps the only thing we can do for the little dragons and their kin is try to preserve them in refuges until a time when the people and governments of the world develop a higher ecological consciousness and begin to undo the damage humans continue to wreak on Earth.
Many generations of dragon hunters will miss their turns.
-Ben Tambaschi is a biology and religious studies senior.
-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec. Send e-mail to letters@thedailyaztec.com. Anonymous letters will not be printed - include your full name, major and year in school.
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