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Radical rethink required to save rare species
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ZSSD/MINDEN
This Thisweek– week– Biodiversity–
Innovate or watch them die Radical measures are required if we are to prevent thousands of species from becoming extinct –Going the way of the dinosaurs…– PETER ALDHOUS AND BOB HOLMES
IT IS one of the most depressing lists ever created. Species by species, the World Conservation Union’s Red List, published this week, details the huge swathe of life being driven towards oblivion. According to the list, 16,306 species are now defined as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. According to the best available data, 51 per cent of invertebrate species, 39 per cent of fish, 31 per cent of reptiles and amphibians, 20 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds are threatened. “We’re losing the battle on almost every front,” says Gretchen Daily of Stanford University, California. However, while the Red List 6 | NewScientist | 15 September 2007
details a biodiversity crisis that is all too familiar, the tactics required to tackle it are not. “Traditional approaches on their own are utterly doomed to failure,” says Daily. So she and other conservationists are introducing a raft of innovative policies in a bid to save as many species as they can. There are a host of reasons why traditional approaches are failing, Daily argues. Given the extent of habitat destruction, even a massive expansion of protected areas could probably only protect 5 per cent of species. The trade in wild species continues, and the spread of invasive plants and animals increasingly threatens native varieties. Even in pristine habitats, climate change is
shifting species boundaries too fast for many creatures to adapt. Such enormous challenges require radical solutions. One approach is to use market forces to safeguard ecosystems. This is the goal of an emerging trend known as the “ecosystem services” approach. Championed by Daily and Peter Kareiva, lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), among others, the idea is to put a monetary value on the services that healthy ecosystems provide for human populations – from the role of forest cover in preventing soil erosion and flooding, to the pollination of crops by insects, and revenues from ecotourism. Conservationists would then work with local
governments, industry and the financial markets to set up incentives encouraging measures for the protection of ecosystems and the vital services they provide. This, the theory goes, should protect biodiversity more effectively than approaches that simply rely on appealing to moral duty or the aesthetic attraction of conserving nature. Ecosystem services schemes are now being implemented around the world. It is too early to point to many clear success stories, but perhaps the most ambitious effort is a collaboration launched in 2006 involving Stanford University, TNC and the WWF. Called the Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, it is working to apply the principles of ecosystem www.newscientist.com
In this section ● Protecting athletes from infection, page 10 ● Cylinder of invisibility, page 16 ● Women “come into heat”, page 18
www.newscientist.com
“On their own, traditional approaches to saving endangered species are utterly doomed to failure” Sugihara wants to supplement the cap with a system of tradeable credits for accidental turtle catches. The idea is that individual crews should be able to buy and sell their credits, allowing some boats to profit by fishing less aggressively. Conservation organisations would also be able to buy up credits, and so reward crews who avoid catching turtles. By providing alternative income, Sugihara argues, it should be possible to minimise the threat to turtles and encourage more sustainable fish catches.
not an either/or situation”. In addition to finding new motivations for conservation, other experts say more work is needed to show whether the actions being taken actually have the desired effect – something that until now has been sorely lacking. For example, when Paul Ferraro, an environmental economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and his colleagues compared species protected under the US Endangered Species Act against unprotected species closely matched in their biological characteristics, they found that putting a species on the endangered list actually hurt its chances of recovery – unless the listing was backed up by
Some conservationists are deeply worried by talk of market forces and cash values, fearing that this will lead to biodiversity suffering further if it cannot be shown to pay its way. Last year in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/443027a), Stanford graduate student Douglas McCauley argued that there is little evidence that such approaches work, concluding: “We must act quickly to redirect much of the effort now being devoted to the commodification of nature back towards instilling a love for nature in more people.” “Commodification is a bad word,” responds Kareiva. “It’s about adding value.” He is all for recognising the inherent value of intact ecosystems, “but there are a lot of reasons for conservation. It’s
SAVE THE GORILLA, ATTACK EBOLA In the next few months, sharpshooters will stalk the African jungle, seeking western lowland gorillas. They will aim not to slaughter, but to save, with darts that could soon carry vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus. This week the gorilla’s status was changed from “endangered” to “critically endangered” on the World Conservation Union’s Red List, largely because of the Ebola threat. It is the first time a mammal has been classed as critically endangered because of the risk of disease. The move is also unusual because tens of thousands of lowland gorillas remain – mainly in Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon. This contrasts sharply with the eastern mountain gorilla, now reduced to a few hundred and threatened by gunmen with real bullets. The idea is to help lowland gorillas avoid a similar fate, says Michael Hoffman of Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia, a lead author of the Red List assessment. “A species is critically endangered if it falls by 80 per cent in three of its generations,” he told New Scientist. “The lowland gorillas have fallen by 60 per cent in 25 years – just one generation.” That slide is likely to continue unless drastic action is taken. Bushmeat hunting for lowland gorilla is unabated
and the Ebola virus is expected to reach uninfected gorilla habitats within a few years. Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, believes Ebola is crossing Africa in an epidemic wave, probably carried by fruit bats. Once infected, he suggests, gorillas transmit the virus amongst themselves, killing 95 per cent of animals in affected groups. If that is the pattern of spread, he says then “vaccination becomes doable. We target the next gorillas in the path of the wave”. And not all the animals need be immunised, as herd GAVRIEL JECAN/GETTY
services in four regions of threatened biodiversity: the Hawaiian islands, the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, the Eastern Arc mountains in Tanzania and China’s upper Yangtze basin. The NatCap team has put together a model called InVEST, which takes data routinely collected by governments and uses it to calculate the economic effects of various conservation actions. Tourism statistics and land use data, for example, can be used to estimate ecotourism revenues likely to accrue from opening new reserves, and also to show how these gains would be diminished if the surrounding forest was logged. NatCap is now helping the Chinese government consider the costs and benefits of policies to protect forests and encourage new planting, in the upper Yangtze, where severe floods – exacerbated by the loss of forests – killed thousands of people in 1998. So far, governments have provided most of the funding for ecosystem services schemes. In the long run “we’re going to have to get private markets involved,” says Daily. George Sugihara, a mathematical ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, agrees. Having taken a four-year break from academia to work in financial modelling for Deutsche Bank, he believes novel market mechanisms can help by appealing to people’s desire to make money. Sugihara is talking to the state government of Hawaii about setting up a market mechanism to help manage the islands’ swordfish-fishing fleet and to minimise accidental catches of endangered turtles. Currently, the fishery closes for the season once the fleet has caught either 17 loggerhead turtles or 16 leatherbacks between them as by-catch. The problem is that this causes individual boats to fish as aggressively as possible to maximise their swordfish catch before the cap is reached.
immunity limits gorilla-to-gorilla spread. Exactly such geographically strategic, low-coverage vaccination was reported last year to have saved the critically endangered Ethiopian wolf from rabies. But rabies has long had an oral wildlife vaccine. Ebola doesn’t – yet. Several Ebola vaccines are in trials, and could be given to gorillas either by dart injection or orally in “baits”. This week, the Republic of the Congo approved tests of baits and darting, to see which could best deliver vaccine. Extensive safety tests will be needed, especially for live oral vaccine, but a few companies are interested, including GenPhar of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Its vaccine, live adenovirus carrying Ebola protein, protected monkeys from high doses of virus in US army tests to be published shortly. Since ecologists realised that disease can contribute to extinctions, vaccination is increasingly discussed as a conservation tool. Zebra in Kenya and rhino in Namibia are vaccinated for anthrax, and cheetahs could be next. Now under debate is the vaccination of US bison for brucellosis, African foxes, wild dogs and lions for rabies and canine distemper, and seals for phocine distemper. Chimps, which are also threatened, may receive Ebola vaccination. Debora MacKenzie
15 September 2007 | NewScientist | 7
financial support (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, DOI: 10.1016/ j.jeem.2007.01.002). “We know that policies and programmes work in some places, but how much and where are questions that are still difficult to answer,” says Ferraro. Costa Rica, for example, has attracted praise for its programme of paying forest landowners to protect biodiversity. However, an analysis of the scheme by a team led by Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, suggests this programme has had no measurable impact on deforestation rates – perhaps because earlier policies had done such a good job of reducing deforestation that little additional help was needed (Conservation Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.15231739.2007.00751.x). Ferraro argues that such conservation programmes must also include an experimental angle. He is in discussion with the Rainforest Alliance about adding this element to a programme to encourage coffee growers in Colombia and other countries to grow their coffee under the forest canopy instead of in clear-cut plantations. The idea would be to start with a pool of growers who wanted to sign up, then randomly
MIKE PARRY/SCIENCE FACTION/GETTY
This week– be wasting money,” says Andrew Pullin who heads the centre. Leading conservationists generally endorse the evidencebased approach. “We don’t do enough of that,” says Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for WWF in Washington DC. Others, such as Tom Brooks, a conservation biologist at Conservation International’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, also in Washington DC, caution that relying too strongly on evidence-based conservation may bring its own risks. “You could have the perverse result of deepening the biodiversity crisis,” he says, if conservation resources focus on areas that are wealthy enough to collect relevant data. Two such areas are the US and –Can market forces save leatherback turtles?– Europe, where the threat to biodiversity is lowest. Other concerns are that Meanwhile, other groups are exclude some. While that may evidence-based and ecosystem omit willing participants, it would gleaning similar insights by services schemes are difficult to sifting through published papers allow programme managers to and reports in systematic reviews set up, and that the clock is check whether any apparently already ticking. “I worry that we’re successful outcome was achieved of what has worked in the past. One such review by the Centre for not going to have enough time,” simply because the growers says Daily. Evidence-Based Conservation at that signed up were those that Given the dismal performance the University of Wales, Bangor, in could not afford to clear-cut the UK, for example, revealed that of traditional approaches to the canopy anyway. getting people to protect natural the common – and expensive – resources, she argues, things have practice of installing weirs and “Without financial support, breakwaters in streams to provide to change. “We’re stuffing putting a species on the ourselves in an all-you-can-eat shelter for salmon and trout has endangered list can actually buffet,” she says. “We need to no effect. “The tentative hurt its chances of recovery” introduce some table manners.” ● conclusion is that we could well
RARE FROGS HOP ON A SUPER-SIZED ‘ARK’ An enormous captive breeding programme is another innovation aimed at saving rare species. Amphibian Ark, a global conservation organisation jointly run by the World Conservation Union and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, is coordinating the largest such programme ever. The goal is to help avert what many fear will be the largest mass extinction since that of the dinosaurs, and save as many as half of the planet’s 6000 or so species of frogs and other amphibians, whose populations are being ravaged by a rapidly spreading parasitic fungus. Captive breeding is often criticised for its huge costs and rare successes. A
8 | NewScientist | 15 September 2007
few species, such as the California condor or the Przewalski’s horse, have made it back into the wild, but “if the same money had been spent protecting rainforests in Brazil or Indonesia, it would have saved many more species”, says Hugh Possingham of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Amphibian breeding programmes are relatively cheap, however: it takes just $50,000 to $100,000 to save one species from extinction, according to Amphibian Ark. It plans to coordinate 500 separate breeding programmes at zoos around the world, to save the 500 most endangered amphibian species that cannot be protected in the wild. “We cannot
mitigate the effects of the chytrid fungus in the wild, so our only choice is rescue and captive sanctuary, with the hope that some day we can correct the problems in the wild and reintroduce them,” says Kevin Zippel of Amphibian Ark, based in Auburn, New York. Saving the amphibians could have a far greater impact than saving a single iconic species like the condor. “With the amphibian crisis, we’re talking about losing a huge chunk of biodiversity – and a huge chunk of biomass. We really have no idea what impact this will have on other species or on the ecosystem,” says Zippel. Amphibian Ark also plans to tap the
often considerable expertise of the world’s amphibian enthusiasts. Zippel describes the controls of one amateur frog room he visited in Germany as “like a cockpit of an airplane. Rain and mist were regulated. Sunrise happened in five phases”. Some amateurs breed enough rarer amphibians to repopulate areas that have suffered local extinctions. Biosecurity issues and the need for permits to keep rare species means that amateurs are unlikely to be used in breeding programmes for endangered species. Nevertheless, they could be enlisted to help work out the best way to breed key species not yet endangered. Rachel Nowak, Melbourne
www.newscientist.com
ZSSD/MINDEN
This Thisweek– week– Biodiversity–
Innovate or watch them die Radical measures are required if we are to prevent thousands of species from becoming extinct –Going the way of the dinosaurs…– PETER ALDHOUS AND BOB HOLMES
IT IS one of the most depressing lists ever created. Species by species, the World Conservation Union’s Red List, published this week, details the huge swathe of life being driven towards oblivion. According to the list, 16,306 species are now defined as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. According to the best available data, 51 per cent of invertebrate species, 39 per cent of fish, 31 per cent of reptiles and amphibians, 20 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds are threatened. “We’re losing the battle on almost every front,” says Gretchen Daily of Stanford University, California. However, while the Red List 6 | NewScientist | 15 September 2007
details a biodiversity crisis that is all too familiar, the tactics required to tackle it are not. “Traditional approaches on their own are utterly doomed to failure,” says Daily. So she and other conservationists are introducing a raft of innovative policies in a bid to save as many species as they can. There are a host of reasons why traditional approaches are failing, Daily argues. Given the extent of habitat destruction, even a massive expansion of protected areas could probably only protect 5 per cent of species. The trade in wild species continues, and the spread of invasive plants and animals increasingly threatens native varieties. Even in pristine habitats, climate change is
shifting species boundaries too fast for many creatures to adapt. Such enormous challenges require radical solutions. One approach is to use market forces to safeguard ecosystems. This is the goal of an emerging trend known as the “ecosystem services” approach. Championed by Daily and Peter Kareiva, lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), among others, the idea is to put a monetary value on the services that healthy ecosystems provide for human populations – from the role of forest cover in preventing soil erosion and flooding, to the pollination of crops by insects, and revenues from ecotourism. Conservationists would then work with local
governments, industry and the financial markets to set up incentives encouraging measures for the protection of ecosystems and the vital services they provide. This, the theory goes, should protect biodiversity more effectively than approaches that simply rely on appealing to moral duty or the aesthetic attraction of conserving nature. Ecosystem services schemes are now being implemented around the world. It is too early to point to many clear success stories, but perhaps the most ambitious effort is a collaboration launched in 2006 involving Stanford University, TNC and the WWF. Called the Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, it is working to apply the principles of ecosystem www.newscientist.com
In this section ● Protecting athletes from infection, page 10 ● Cylinder of invisibility, page 16 ● Women “come into heat”, page 18
www.newscientist.com
“On their own, traditional approaches to saving endangered species are utterly doomed to failure” Sugihara wants to supplement the cap with a system of tradeable credits for accidental turtle catches. The idea is that individual crews should be able to buy and sell their credits, allowing some boats to profit by fishing less aggressively. Conservation organisations would also be able to buy up credits, and so reward crews who avoid catching turtles. By providing alternative income, Sugihara argues, it should be possible to minimise the threat to turtles and encourage more sustainable fish catches.
not an either/or situation”. In addition to finding new motivations for conservation, other experts say more work is needed to show whether the actions being taken actually have the desired effect – something that until now has been sorely lacking. For example, when Paul Ferraro, an environmental economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and his colleagues compared species protected under the US Endangered Species Act against unprotected species closely matched in their biological characteristics, they found that putting a species on the endangered list actually hurt its chances of recovery – unless the listing was backed up by
Some conservationists are deeply worried by talk of market forces and cash values, fearing that this will lead to biodiversity suffering further if it cannot be shown to pay its way. Last year in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/443027a), Stanford graduate student Douglas McCauley argued that there is little evidence that such approaches work, concluding: “We must act quickly to redirect much of the effort now being devoted to the commodification of nature back towards instilling a love for nature in more people.” “Commodification is a bad word,” responds Kareiva. “It’s about adding value.” He is all for recognising the inherent value of intact ecosystems, “but there are a lot of reasons for conservation. It’s
SAVE THE GORILLA, ATTACK EBOLA In the next few months, sharpshooters will stalk the African jungle, seeking western lowland gorillas. They will aim not to slaughter, but to save, with darts that could soon carry vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus. This week the gorilla’s status was changed from “endangered” to “critically endangered” on the World Conservation Union’s Red List, largely because of the Ebola threat. It is the first time a mammal has been classed as critically endangered because of the risk of disease. The move is also unusual because tens of thousands of lowland gorillas remain – mainly in Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon. This contrasts sharply with the eastern mountain gorilla, now reduced to a few hundred and threatened by gunmen with real bullets. The idea is to help lowland gorillas avoid a similar fate, says Michael Hoffman of Conservation International in Arlington, Virginia, a lead author of the Red List assessment. “A species is critically endangered if it falls by 80 per cent in three of its generations,” he told New Scientist. “The lowland gorillas have fallen by 60 per cent in 25 years – just one generation.” That slide is likely to continue unless drastic action is taken. Bushmeat hunting for lowland gorilla is unabated
and the Ebola virus is expected to reach uninfected gorilla habitats within a few years. Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, believes Ebola is crossing Africa in an epidemic wave, probably carried by fruit bats. Once infected, he suggests, gorillas transmit the virus amongst themselves, killing 95 per cent of animals in affected groups. If that is the pattern of spread, he says then “vaccination becomes doable. We target the next gorillas in the path of the wave”. And not all the animals need be immunised, as herd GAVRIEL JECAN/GETTY
services in four regions of threatened biodiversity: the Hawaiian islands, the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, the Eastern Arc mountains in Tanzania and China’s upper Yangtze basin. The NatCap team has put together a model called InVEST, which takes data routinely collected by governments and uses it to calculate the economic effects of various conservation actions. Tourism statistics and land use data, for example, can be used to estimate ecotourism revenues likely to accrue from opening new reserves, and also to show how these gains would be diminished if the surrounding forest was logged. NatCap is now helping the Chinese government consider the costs and benefits of policies to protect forests and encourage new planting, in the upper Yangtze, where severe floods – exacerbated by the loss of forests – killed thousands of people in 1998. So far, governments have provided most of the funding for ecosystem services schemes. In the long run “we’re going to have to get private markets involved,” says Daily. George Sugihara, a mathematical ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, agrees. Having taken a four-year break from academia to work in financial modelling for Deutsche Bank, he believes novel market mechanisms can help by appealing to people’s desire to make money. Sugihara is talking to the state government of Hawaii about setting up a market mechanism to help manage the islands’ swordfish-fishing fleet and to minimise accidental catches of endangered turtles. Currently, the fishery closes for the season once the fleet has caught either 17 loggerhead turtles or 16 leatherbacks between them as by-catch. The problem is that this causes individual boats to fish as aggressively as possible to maximise their swordfish catch before the cap is reached.
immunity limits gorilla-to-gorilla spread. Exactly such geographically strategic, low-coverage vaccination was reported last year to have saved the critically endangered Ethiopian wolf from rabies. But rabies has long had an oral wildlife vaccine. Ebola doesn’t – yet. Several Ebola vaccines are in trials, and could be given to gorillas either by dart injection or orally in “baits”. This week, the Republic of the Congo approved tests of baits and darting, to see which could best deliver vaccine. Extensive safety tests will be needed, especially for live oral vaccine, but a few companies are interested, including GenPhar of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Its vaccine, live adenovirus carrying Ebola protein, protected monkeys from high doses of virus in US army tests to be published shortly. Since ecologists realised that disease can contribute to extinctions, vaccination is increasingly discussed as a conservation tool. Zebra in Kenya and rhino in Namibia are vaccinated for anthrax, and cheetahs could be next. Now under debate is the vaccination of US bison for brucellosis, African foxes, wild dogs and lions for rabies and canine distemper, and seals for phocine distemper. Chimps, which are also threatened, may receive Ebola vaccination. Debora MacKenzie
15 September 2007 | NewScientist | 7
financial support (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, DOI: 10.1016/ j.jeem.2007.01.002). “We know that policies and programmes work in some places, but how much and where are questions that are still difficult to answer,” says Ferraro. Costa Rica, for example, has attracted praise for its programme of paying forest landowners to protect biodiversity. However, an analysis of the scheme by a team led by Arturo Sánchez-Azofeifa at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, suggests this programme has had no measurable impact on deforestation rates – perhaps because earlier policies had done such a good job of reducing deforestation that little additional help was needed (Conservation Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.15231739.2007.00751.x). Ferraro argues that such conservation programmes must also include an experimental angle. He is in discussion with the Rainforest Alliance about adding this element to a programme to encourage coffee growers in Colombia and other countries to grow their coffee under the forest canopy instead of in clear-cut plantations. The idea would be to start with a pool of growers who wanted to sign up, then randomly
MIKE PARRY/SCIENCE FACTION/GETTY
This week– be wasting money,” says Andrew Pullin who heads the centre. Leading conservationists generally endorse the evidencebased approach. “We don’t do enough of that,” says Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for WWF in Washington DC. Others, such as Tom Brooks, a conservation biologist at Conservation International’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, also in Washington DC, caution that relying too strongly on evidence-based conservation may bring its own risks. “You could have the perverse result of deepening the biodiversity crisis,” he says, if conservation resources focus on areas that are wealthy enough to collect relevant data. Two such areas are the US and –Can market forces save leatherback turtles?– Europe, where the threat to biodiversity is lowest. Other concerns are that Meanwhile, other groups are exclude some. While that may evidence-based and ecosystem omit willing participants, it would gleaning similar insights by services schemes are difficult to sifting through published papers allow programme managers to and reports in systematic reviews set up, and that the clock is check whether any apparently already ticking. “I worry that we’re successful outcome was achieved of what has worked in the past. One such review by the Centre for not going to have enough time,” simply because the growers says Daily. Evidence-Based Conservation at that signed up were those that Given the dismal performance the University of Wales, Bangor, in could not afford to clear-cut the UK, for example, revealed that of traditional approaches to the canopy anyway. getting people to protect natural the common – and expensive – resources, she argues, things have practice of installing weirs and “Without financial support, breakwaters in streams to provide to change. “We’re stuffing putting a species on the ourselves in an all-you-can-eat shelter for salmon and trout has endangered list can actually buffet,” she says. “We need to no effect. “The tentative hurt its chances of recovery” introduce some table manners.” ● conclusion is that we could well
RARE FROGS HOP ON A SUPER-SIZED ‘ARK’ An enormous captive breeding programme is another innovation aimed at saving rare species. Amphibian Ark, a global conservation organisation jointly run by the World Conservation Union and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, is coordinating the largest such programme ever. The goal is to help avert what many fear will be the largest mass extinction since that of the dinosaurs, and save as many as half of the planet’s 6000 or so species of frogs and other amphibians, whose populations are being ravaged by a rapidly spreading parasitic fungus. Captive breeding is often criticised for its huge costs and rare successes. A
8 | NewScientist | 15 September 2007
few species, such as the California condor or the Przewalski’s horse, have made it back into the wild, but “if the same money had been spent protecting rainforests in Brazil or Indonesia, it would have saved many more species”, says Hugh Possingham of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Amphibian breeding programmes are relatively cheap, however: it takes just $50,000 to $100,000 to save one species from extinction, according to Amphibian Ark. It plans to coordinate 500 separate breeding programmes at zoos around the world, to save the 500 most endangered amphibian species that cannot be protected in the wild. “We cannot
mitigate the effects of the chytrid fungus in the wild, so our only choice is rescue and captive sanctuary, with the hope that some day we can correct the problems in the wild and reintroduce them,” says Kevin Zippel of Amphibian Ark, based in Auburn, New York. Saving the amphibians could have a far greater impact than saving a single iconic species like the condor. “With the amphibian crisis, we’re talking about losing a huge chunk of biodiversity – and a huge chunk of biomass. We really have no idea what impact this will have on other species or on the ecosystem,” says Zippel. Amphibian Ark also plans to tap the
often considerable expertise of the world’s amphibian enthusiasts. Zippel describes the controls of one amateur frog room he visited in Germany as “like a cockpit of an airplane. Rain and mist were regulated. Sunrise happened in five phases”. Some amateurs breed enough rarer amphibians to repopulate areas that have suffered local extinctions. Biosecurity issues and the need for permits to keep rare species means that amateurs are unlikely to be used in breeding programmes for endangered species. Nevertheless, they could be enlisted to help work out the best way to breed key species not yet endangered. Rachel Nowak, Melbourne
www.newscientist.com