Back in that other millennium, when I worked at day care, one of my favorite things to read in the afternoon on a swim day when 30 children flopped onto the floor for quiet time was “Frog and Toad are friends”. The series used very nice illustrations to tell great stories of ‘Frog’, (who was free-spirited and easily social), and the more inaccessible ‘Toad’, who was kind of asperger’s-y and harder to love. They were “friends” and had lots of adventures together, but with this article from the Oregonian we may need to tell a new story.
Study finds a steady decline in territory occupied by amphibians in the United States
Herpetologist Michael Adams was the lead author on a groundbreaking study that found a steady decline in the territory occupied by amphibians in the United States. The decline stretched across all regions, and into relatively unspoiled national parks and wildlife refuges.
Instead of focusing on individual populations, Adams and his colleagues analyzed “occupancy” – whether a spot is occupied by a particular amphibian or not. That’s a blunter gauge than individual population counts, but less variable, simpler and a clear way to track how fast creatures are disappearing from places where they’re known to live.
The researchers also developed a statistical model to account for false negatives — the chances that field workers missed a stray amphibian when declaring a spot unoccupied.
Their estimates “quantify amphibian declines to an extent that really hasn’t been possible,” says Michael Lannoo, a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine and the United States’ representative on IUCN’s Amphibian Specialist Group. Lannoo was among the peer reviewers of the study.“We’ve known about amphibian population declines for a long time, but the problem may be worse than we thought,” Adams says. “We need to be careful.”
The article is a nice look at complex ecoscience, with stunning photos that make you feel like you’re outdoors on a early summer day in the sierras and just found a private creek of your very own. Go check it out. Apparently the ozone layer isn’t killing as many amphibians at the moment but there may be lots of other things that are, like fungus and predators and habitat.
But this is my favorite sentence in the entire article, and what I would define as the ‘money shot’.
Beaver dams can create prime amphibian habitat, so carefully re-introducing beavers can help, too.
Which reminds me, that this is the first year SAVE THE FROGS will be exhibiting at our beaver festival!
