Volunteers help salamanders avoid roadway massacre:
From rural Vermont to urban centers like Philadelphia, human escorts, called bucket brigades in some places, help amphibians make it to their mating areas without getting squashed by cars. It's part education, part conservation, and part science.
"It's an extraordinary thing and people deserve to know about it," said Warren King, a member of the Otter Creek Audubon Society, who organizes a crossing in Salisbury. "And it needs to be protected. There are sites where many of the critters that are crossing never make it."
Wait a sec - aren't they violating the law of natural selection? How do they know for certain that the slowest salamanders shouldn't be getting flattened so those genes don't stay in the gene pool? The strong will survive to reproduce and make the population better able to survive in their habitat which, obviously, includes roads.
Clearly it's the cars that are doing the conservation here, and these people are messing things up.
At least according to the science of evolution.
But isn't the big question, "Why did the salamander cross the road?"