The Salamander Room



This week we read the story "The Salamander Room".  It is a very cute story about a little boy who brings a salamander into his room to live.  He imagines what it would be like to transform his room into the forest where the salamander lives. 

This is a cool article that we found:
The Northwestern Salamanders have migrated into local waters and their la

rge softball sized clumps of jellied eggs can be found attached to submerged grasses or other small vegetation. Its hard to imagine how this huge mass of eggs could come out of a tiny brown salamander. However, it's an old amphibian trick. The eggs come out of the female quite in proportion to her body size, then absorb water to swell up 20 times bigger. The large size of t amphibian trick. The eggs come out of the female quite in proportion to her body size, then absorb water to swell up 20 times bigger. The large size of the jelly size is thought to help focus the sunlight, sort of like a magnifying glass, so the eggs warm up quicker. Another idea is that the thick layer of jelly, which is not very edible, discourages some predators from snacking on the developing embryos.    These salamanders are in the mole salamander family, and when not in the water, spend their life underground hunting in shallow burrows under the soil.