It was 1990—as I was putting together plans at the
Los Angeles Times for what would become a weekly package of syndicated articles about the environment—when I first encountered scientists worried about what seemed to be happening to the world's amphibian population. A few specialists had begun noticing reduced populations of cold-blooded frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and worm-like caecilians a few years before. In 1989 at the First World Congress of Herpetology, the issue got broader attention, which led to the establishment of the Declining Amphibian Population Taskforce.
But in those days, considerable scientific objections were raised to the very idea that amphibian populations were engaged in anything more than a natural up and down variation over time. Soon, however, it became obvious that something more profound was going on (Free article with registration). Some scientists began calling amphibian loss as the "canary in the coal mine," a harbinger of some great change due to environmental factors that could affect other species, including ours. But the questions were, what change and what factors?
Amphibians have been around for more than 300 million years. Today there are some 6,000 species. But every single one of them may be in danger of extinction. Half are already under threat and scores have already been lost.
Scientists have over the past two decades collected immense amounts of data about amphibians and the population crash has been a prime topic of conversation at the six meetings of the World Congress of Herpetology held since that first one 24 years ago. But what they have yet to discover is a definitive answer to what is happening to these creatures and, therefore, no means of stopping the die-off.
Julia Whitty at Mother Jones writes Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End:
Amphibians are disappearing horrifyingly fast worldwide, with a third of species imperiled. But they're disappearing even faster than believed in the US—and probably worldwide (more on that below)—according to the first ever analysis of the rate of population losses among frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts.
Red-eyed tree frog of Costa Rica
A team of researchers with the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative analyzed the rate of change in the probability of 48 amphibian species occupying ponds and other moist habitats in 34 sites over a period of nine years. […]
What they found: overall occupancy by amphibians declined 3.7 percent a year from 2002 to 2011. That seemingly small number adds up to particularly virulent form of extinction hunting down these species within two decades if the rate of decline remains unchanged.
Much worse, species Red-listed as threatened or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declined on average 11.6 percent a year.
Surprisingly, declines occurred even in protected lands, like national parks and national wildlife refuges. "The declines of amphibians in these protected areas are particularly worrisome because they suggest that some stressors—such as diseases, contaminants and drought—transcend landscapes," says lead author Michael Adams.
While the PLOS ONE paper didn't address causes, another recent study found a multitude of natural and manmade stressors affecting amphibians, including human-induced habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species, and climate change.
"An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it," says Andrew Blaustein, author of the 2011 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and professor of zoology at Oregon State University.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama! Colbert! Phoenix! We're Calling You Out!:
Without a hefty cash advance, nobody with more than a dozen working synapses would want the job of figuring out over a one-year span whether The Weekly Standard or The Corner, National Review Online's group blog, posts the more aromatic tripe. But, Wednesday at least, it's no contest. In his "It Sticks in My Craw," Mark Krikorian explains that "Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English. ..."
Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
Without getting into the whole multiculturalism contretemps in this matter - Andrew Leonard does a good job of that at Salon - most people, out of courtesy and an expectation of reciprocation, defer to the individual's preference when pronouncing a name. Krikorian allows as how that's okay, "but there ought to be limits." Which he proceeds to establish. |
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