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EDITORIAL BOARD Editor in Chief  Timothy Kudo

Managing Editor

 Michael Falcone

Viewpoint Editor

 Cuauhetmoc Ortega

Staff Representatives

 Kelly Rayburn

 Amanda Fletcher

 Marcelle Richards

 Michaele Turnage

Editorial Board Assistants

 Maegan Carberry

 Edward Chiao

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There’s a bully in town picking on the shrimp. Despite warnings of environmental damage in building its 10th campus at Merced, the UC is still committed to its more than $250 million project. Perhaps the UC should sit in on one of the classes offered in their environmental studies programs – before the natural habitat it has infringed upon and California tax dollars are lost forever.

The building must stop immediately.

While Merced is home to the new campus, it’s also home to some of California’s last remaining vernal pools, or seasonally flooded wetlands, where the Midvalley Fairy Shrimp are making their way toward the Federal Endangered Species List.

Both the Center for Biological Diversity and VernalPools.org have requested federal endangered status for the Midvalley Fairy Shrimp so that the campus does not destroy what’s left of the 3 percent of California’s original vernal pool habitat that has not been lost due to development.

While California may desperately need another campus to provide for its growing student population – an expected increase by 60,000 students over the next decade – and though it has promised to conserve 6,000 of the 7,000 acres remaining in the vernal pool habitat the university will build on, UC Merced is an environmentally and economically dangerous solution.

If the Midvalley Fairy Shrimp makes it to the Federal Endangered Species List, construction will be halted. Only when that happens, the university will be even deeper into the project, and deeper into their pockets. If the UC walked away from the project now, they’d not only preserve Merced’s natural habitat, they’d prevent taxpayers from throwing away dollars better spent elsewhere.

With the state’s uncertain economic future, funding should be redirected to meaningful and guaranteed solutions to student enrollment. Otherwise the UC will end up shoving students into quadruple dorm rooms.

Like campuses before it, Merced will expand. The community will need grocery stores, apartments and other conveniences. Alternative campus sites like Fresno, a city already developed enough to sustain a college campus, should be considered.

The UC knew that the vernal pools existed when the ground was broken, yet they continued anyway. Building the Merced campus will destroy an entire ecosystem on the brink of extinction.

Not just fairy shrimp.