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mphibian Ark Planned to Save Frogs

February 15, 2007 — By Dorie Turner, Associated Press

 

ATLANTA -- Ponds and swamps are becoming eerily silent. The familiar melody of

ribbits, croaks and chirps is disappearing as a mysterious killer fungus wipes

out frog populations around the globe, a phenomenon likened to the extinction of

dinosaurs.

 

Scientists from around the world are meeting Thursday and Friday in Atlanta to

organize a worldwide effort to stem the deaths by asking zoos, aquariums and

botanical gardens to take in threatened frogs until the fungus can be stopped.

 

The aim of the group called Amphibian Ark is to prevent the world's more than

6,000 species of frogs, salamanders and wormlike sicilians from disappearing.

Scientists estimate up to 170 species of frogs have become extinct in the past

decade from the fungus and other causes, and an additional 1,900 species are

threatened.

 

" This is the precedent of a disease working its way across an entire species on

the scale of all mammals, all birds or all fish, " said Joseph Mendelson, curator

of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta and an organizer of Amphibian Ark. " Humans would

be absolutely stupid if they didn't pay attention to that. "

 

Amphibians -- of which frogs make up the majority -- are a vital part of the

food chain, eating insects that other animals don't touch and connecting the

world of aquatic animals to land dwellers. Without amphibians, the insects that

would go unchecked would threaten public health and food supplies.

 

 

" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies

in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are

cold and are not clothed. "

-- Dwight Eisenhower