Frog Matters

Disturbing story today about the connection between fertilizer runoff and frog deformities in the U.S. West. Pieter Johnson, evolutionary biologist with the University of Colorado in Boulder, discovered this.

I love basketball, but I was never good at it. That’s not Coach Dyer’s fault; he offered encouragement to me back in the seventh grade. I simply didn’t practice enough — didn’t repeat the muscle movements over and over again so that the proper form and motion happened automatically. Muscle memory, they call it.  

Now, I have to admit, I really don’t love amphibians. I never had a frog as a pet, never dragged my parents to the amphibian house when we would visit the zoo, and never understood, until recently, that they are the canaries in the coal mine for our planet’s health. But now that I know Kermit’s in big trouble, I can’t walk away from it.  A team of us at my company is helping a new organization, named Amphibian Ark, to rally support — from governments, corporations, foundations, and consumers — so that it can capture and breed hundreds of threatened amphibian species. 

Among the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) Red List of most endangered wildlife, amphibians hold the distinction of potentially losing up to one-half of their entire class of animal life to extinction in our lifetime – almost 3,000 species. That would be the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs. Amphibian Ark (AArk) was created by IUCN, Conservation Breeding Specialist Group, and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums to do the urgent work that’s necessary to avert the mass extinction, while other organizations will tackle the longer term problems, such as  pollution and habitat loss.

It hasn’t been difficult getting media coverage for the issue, thankfully. But the ultimate success of Amphibian Ark depends on raising $50-$60 million pretty quickly. We need to make a personal impact with the people around the world who write checks, large and small. And let’s be honest, the number of environmental causes competing for funding is starting to look like an L.A. freeway at 4:00.

What separates Amphibian Ark, however, is its relative simplicity and potential for a speedy, happy ending. Once the money starts to flow, Kevin Zippel, a herpetologist and the master builder of the AArk plan, will dispatch scientists to remote areas of the world to capture species, then distribute the frogs, salamanders, newts, toads, and caecilians to multiple zoos.  They’re placing each species in several locations to reduce the chance of disease delivering a coup de grace.

Kevin would make a good basketball coach. He knows the X’s and O’s for saving frogs. He just needs a good booster organization. And we’re building it for him.

It seems to me that, in the U.S. at least, many of us think about our environment the same way I thought about basketball. It’s fun to take a few shots, but not much fun to stay after practice to shoot a hundred free throws. When you miss, you have to retrieve the errant ball, return to the line, and do it all over again. A hundred times, every day.  We need to develop muscle memory to face and manage the really important environmental issues. If we begin with a regimen a small steps to save our planet, confidently expecting a positive outcome for our sacrifice, the momentum will alter the future for our children and their children. A quick “win” would do wonders for conditioning that muscle. AArk can provide that quick win.Dr. Jeffrey Bonner, the president of the St. Louis Zoo, is the visionary who brought us into this issue. He asked us to sit down with him to discuss the action plan for fixing the amphibian crisis. He calls Amphibian Ark a landmark learning experience for mankind. I believe he’s right.

They’re protecting the Great Crested Newt from a construction project in East Northamptonshire in central England. According to the story, 70 percent of this species is located in the UK.  

Alisa Opar writes about the amphibian crisis and the Amphibian Ark connection in today’s Plenty Magazine online. 

Here’s a new list of threatened amphibian species in the U.S. and Canada, ranked in order of priority for bringing into captivity and breeding under the Amphibian Ark initiative.  The plan in the U.S.  and Canada is going to be implemented by the zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.  The list starts on page 2. At the top of the list: the Ozark Hellbender, a salamander, pictured above.

The gastric-brooder (Rheobatrachus silus) was discovered in the 1970s and vanished within 20 years. The culprit? You guessed it: chytrid. This miracle of Australia would hatch its eggs in her stomach and then, voila!, the little brooder-ettes would hop out of her mouth. Now, you should be asking yourself how eggs could survive in a stomach full of enzymes to break down food. The fact is, enzyme production somehow shut down during gestation. Scientists think that a lot could have been learned from it all – a cure for gastric ulcers, perhaps, or new insights for treating obesity. But we’ll never know.  Once you’re extinct, there’s no rewind button.

We need to raise $50-$60 million so that Amphibian Ark can save 500 species of amphibians. Sound impossible? Consider this:  we paid $50 million for tickets to see Talladega Nights on its opening weekend.  We can do this.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the African Clawed Frog was discovered to be a heck of a good pregnancy test. The species is indigenous to southern Africa and is immune to something else indigenous to the region — chytrid fungus. So when the frog was shipped around the world for this medical use, it brought the chytrid fungus along for the ride.  Wherever the fungus took root in countless new places around the world, it was fatal to 80% of the new species it encountered. So what’s it really do? See “TBS Program…” post from yesterday. Or here are two articles: a good overview by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service and one filled with science jargon by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Learn about the petition that recently was launched in Budapest at the World Association of Zoos & Aquariums conference.  Here’s a Reuters wire story about it.

Just in case you missed it, this is an August report from The Osgood File that captures the situation very well.