Latest Decline in amphibian populations Stories
Most countries throughout the world participate in the $40-million-per-year culinary trade of frog legs in some way, with 75 percent of frog legs consumed in France, Belgium and the United States. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues have found that this trade is a potential carrier of pathogens deadly to amphibians. The team's findings are published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology, Thursday, Nov. 19.Amphibians are rapidly declining worldwide. More than...
Sometimes to see something properly, you have to stand farther back. This is true of Chuck Close portraits where a patchwork of many small faces changes into one giant face as you back away.It may also be true of the frogs of Central America, where the pattern of extinctions emerges clearly only at a certain spatial scale. Everyone knows that frogs are in trouble and that some species have disappeared, but a recent analysis of Central American frog surveys shows the situation is worse than...
The world's leading amphibian experts have come together and for the first time identified two major conservation initiatives to protect the amphibians of the world from becoming extinct.The new coalition of organizations, the Amphibian Survival Alliance, will work together on scientific research and fund-raising to focus on containing the spread of the amphibian chytrid fungus and protecting the only amphibian habitats that contain amphibians that are not found anywhere else in the...
Pollution, climate change, invasive species and habitat destruction are killing Europe's native reptiles and amphibians, wildlife experts said. Fifty-nine percent of all European amphibians and 42 percent of reptiles are declining and face even greater risk than European mammals and birds, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said. In all, 23 percent of Europe's amphibian species and 21 percent of its reptile species have been classified as threatened and added to the...
A fatal fungus that has killed hundreds of different kinds of frogs in the US is now harming five different frog species in the Philippines, experts announced on Wednesday.A nationwide survey conducted by US and Filipino scientists discovered that the Philippines is the third country in Asia to be affected by the chytrid fungus.The fungus, which targets the skin of frogs and distresses the arrangement of tadpoles' body parts, is also in Japan and Indonesia.The Luzon striped frog, one of the...
A U.S. study suggests amphibians might be able to develop immunity to the fatal fungus disease that is reducing the Earth's amphibian populations. Jonathan Richmond of the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues said they discovered individual amphibians can develop both acquired and innate immunity to the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which is caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The researchers said scientists should broaden their studies of chytridiomycosis to include...
A U.S. study of amphibians suggests diversity itself might lower the chances of developing parasitic infections. The University of Colorado at Boulder study showed American toads who lived with gray tree frogs reduced their chances of parasitic infections known to cause limb malformations. Researchers say their findings have strong implications for the benefits of biodiversity on emerging wildlife diseases. The scientists said their experiments showed when toad tadpoles were raised in...
Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They're victims of a fungus that's decimating amphibian populations worldwide.Such catastrophic declines have been documented for more than a decade, but until recently scientists knew little about how the loss of frogs alters the larger ecosystem. A University of Georgia study that is the first to comprehensively examine an ecosystem before and after an amphibian population decline has...
By Anonymous A new study has found that elevated ozone found in lower layers of the atmosphere could be yet another contributing factor to the ongoing decline and disappearance of many populations of amphibians. The study was published in a recent issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (Volume 27, Issue 5). Declines of many amphibian populations over the past two decades have received significant attention from biologists, in part because amphibians are viewed as monitors or...
Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.In an article published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet."There's no question...
