On Sunday, I went on a trip to Alley Pond Park for the Macaulay Bio Blitz. Upon arriving there, we were each assigned to different groups to determine what we would be doing at the park. My group’s job was to find salamander in the park. It sounded like a tough job (salamander are quite small amphibians). Yet luckily, we determined the right place and environment they like to live in and we found some pretty easily. As we learnt in class, each ecosystem has certain abiotic and biotic factors that contribute to its animals, plants and environment in it. Here for example, Salamander like to live under logs- because they look cool and moist environments. It was pretty cool to see how a log which was once a biotic factor of the ecosystem, a living tree, was now an abiotic factor for the salamander, becoming its shelter.Â
