Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians may eventually have no place to shelter, a new study predicts.
Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians may eventually have no place to shelter because of a triple threat of worsening scourges, a new study predicts.
Scientists have long known that amphibians are under attack from a killer fungus, climate change and shrinking habitat. In the study appearing online on Wednesday in the journal Nature, computer models project that in about 70 years those three threats will spread, leaving no part of the world immune from one of the problems.
Frogs seem to have the most worrisome outlook, said study lead author Christian Hof of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt.
About one-third of the world's amphibian species are known to be threatened with extinction and 159 species already have disappeared, a 2008 international study found.
'It's no fun being a frog,' said prominent biodiversity conservationist Stuart Pimm of Duke University, who was not part of Hof's study. 'They are getting it from all three different factors.'
Hof's study was the first to look at projections of the three threats by geography and see if they overlap. While they overlap some, it is not nearly as much as expected. The wide distribution of threats leaves no refuge for amphibians.
The strongest threats seem to be where the most species of amphibians live, concentrating the potential loss of diversity, said Hof and Ross Alford, an amphibian expert at James Cook University in Australia, who was not part of the research.
The biggest threats are seen, mostly from climate change, to frogs and other amphibians in tropical Africa, northern South America and the Andes Mountains, areas which Hof calls 'climate losers'. In the northern Andes, which has the largest number of frog species in the world, more than 160 frog species are at risk, he said.
Alford and other outside scientists said they thought Hof's work might be overly pessimistic. But studying the geographic distribution of amphibian threats in the future is important, they said.
Source: http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Environment/2011/11/17/Triple_threat_paints_grim_frog_future_686199.html
Scientists have long known that amphibians are under attack from a killer fungus, climate change and shrinking habitat. In the study appearing online on Wednesday in the journal Nature, computer models project that in about 70 years those three threats will spread, leaving no part of the world immune from one of the problems.
Frogs seem to have the most worrisome outlook, said study lead author Christian Hof of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt.
About one-third of the world's amphibian species are known to be threatened with extinction and 159 species already have disappeared, a 2008 international study found.
'It's no fun being a frog,' said prominent biodiversity conservationist Stuart Pimm of Duke University, who was not part of Hof's study. 'They are getting it from all three different factors.'
Hof's study was the first to look at projections of the three threats by geography and see if they overlap. While they overlap some, it is not nearly as much as expected. The wide distribution of threats leaves no refuge for amphibians.
The strongest threats seem to be where the most species of amphibians live, concentrating the potential loss of diversity, said Hof and Ross Alford, an amphibian expert at James Cook University in Australia, who was not part of the research.
The biggest threats are seen, mostly from climate change, to frogs and other amphibians in tropical Africa, northern South America and the Andes Mountains, areas which Hof calls 'climate losers'. In the northern Andes, which has the largest number of frog species in the world, more than 160 frog species are at risk, he said.
Alford and other outside scientists said they thought Hof's work might be overly pessimistic. But studying the geographic distribution of amphibian threats in the future is important, they said.
Source: http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Environment/2011/11/17/Triple_threat_paints_grim_frog_future_686199.html
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