Lively debates are common in scientific research, and discussions of alleged declines of frogs, toads and other amphibians during the past two decades have been no exception. Now, however, herpetologists worldwide have come to a sudden, frightening consensus: these animals are in deep trouble. USU adjunct associate professor Joseph Mendelson and Professor Edmund Brodie, Jr., along with 48 colleagues from around the world, announced recently in the journal Science that “Amphibian declines and extinctions are global and rapid. … Species have disappeared across the entire taxonomic group and in nearly all regions of the planet.”

Of 5,743 described species, close to a third are threatened, the report says. As many as 122 species may have gone extinct since 1980, including harlequin frogs and golden toads in some of the most protected, pristine cloud forests of Costa Rica. As they disappear, we lose their ecological benefits, their potential contributions to medicine and their unique voices in the planet’s chorus.              

Amphibian disappearances have been noted off and on for at least 20 years, but it’s been difficult to disentangle all the data to show what is now a global crisis. “It’s appalling that we didn’t pick up on it sooner,” says Mendelson, now curator of herpetology at Georgia’s Zoo Atlanta. “We spent a lot of time debating whether the declines being reported were isolated events or the result of sampling errors.”
Only within the last two years have studies shown with certainty that amphibian biodiversity is under threat on a huge scale. Land-use changes and habitat loss, over-collecting for the pet trade and competition with introduced exotic species continue to affect at least 90% of amphibian species, but another newly recognized threat is a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis.

Chytrid disease causes skin infections and massive die-offs, and it is spreading across the planet. It seems to attack indiscriminately, and there is no prevention or treatment known in the wild. Some scientists fear that the extinctions will be comparable to dinosaur die-offs 65 million years ago. “Chytridiomycosis is a danger to all amphibians, a whole class of vertebrates,” says Brodie. “These animals have skin that is highly vulnerable to what’s in the environment, and pollution or climate change may make them even more susceptible.” A species of toad once common in Logan Canyon, the boreal toad, is all but gone now, says Mendelson. “No one noticed. We don’t know what happened to it, but it was almost certainly a result of chytrid fungus.”          

In the face of such adversity, what can be done? The Science article calls for an ambitious effort by “global leaders in research, conservation and policy” to form what will be called the Amphibian Survival Alliance (ASA) within the established World Conservation Union. With a proposed budget of at least $400 million for five years, the ASA will coordinate current efforts to describe and save amphibians around the world, and it will also promote new research on emerging global problems like chytrid disease, environmental toxins and climate change. The scale of this effort will be huge, and ASA’s success will depend on “stakeholders from the academic, zoo, ethics, policy, global change, private sector and international biodiversity convention communities uniting behind one goal.” As examples, the ASA will draw from aggressive, successful programs like the Turtle Survival Alliance, as well as the National Science Foundation’s NEON, Inc., a new, multi-disciplinary, multi-agency effort to monitor and measure North America’s ecological changes. USU professor Jim MacMahon currently chairs NEON’s Board of Directors.

The challenges are great, but Joe Mendelson is hopeful. “It’s been remarkable to see, suddenly, rooms full of scientists and conservationists and others actually agreeing,” he says of the meetings that led to the article in Science. “We were certain that something had to be done, that academia and action had to come together.” —Sally Graves Jackson ’94MS