endangered animals

The Hellbender is an endangered amphibian; it is endangered through out the United States. The scientific name for the Hellbender is Cryptobranchus Alleganiensis. Some myths are that the Hellbender is called the “Devil Dog” because they thought it was poisonous but it’s not true. It lives in the Susquehanna River in southern New York, Pennsylvania, and parts of the Missouri, Ohio, and the Mississippi River. It also lives in the extreme parts of Indiana, most of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Alabama, Georgia, western North Carolina, and Virginia. The Hellbender is sometimes found in South America too. The Hellbenders eat crayfish, fish, frogs, and a lot of different kinds of invertebrates such as worms, insects, and other prey. The Hellbender lives best in drainage, rivers, and other places that have fast running water, large streams, and rivers that have rocky bottoms and plenty of debris on the bottom and well oxygenated and unpolluted streams. The reasons why they are declining is because people haven’t found any evidence of them having successful reproductions, and because of pollution in the waters. Fishermen catch the Hellbenders accidentally and they think they are poisonous, so they kill them. There is nothing being done to help it. We think organizations should step up and do something about it. Maybe the reason that nothing is being done is because the Hellbender isn’t important enough. I think it doesn’t have a chance of surviving. The average length of the Hellbender is about 11-20 inches long. But sometimes it has been up to 29 inches. It’s about 7-15 pounds, and they have different colors: brown, black, yellow, and red with lighter or maybe darker spots. The stomach is lighter than their back. The Hellbender’s body and head are extremely flat with small eyes. The Hellbender is very large. The female Hellbender lays between 270-450 eggs at a time. The Hellbender Salamander is a carnivore amphibian (meaning that it only eats meat)	Dutch

Written by: Brian Chao, Lisa Gomi, Frank Hsu	(geschreven door)