Extinction Report

From Newsweek.
It's odd that this
is the Cover story
for Europe, Asia,
and Latin America
- while the US edition
has a photo of Bush
looking stupid.
Everyone should
know by now that
Bush is ridiculous
(actually that is too
nice of a term for him).
I would rather learn
about the frogs.

(You can also see the National Geopgraphic article from last January - Frog Extinctions Linked to Global Warming)
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Why the Frogs Are Dying

Climate change is no longer merely a matter of numbers from a computer model. With startling swiftness, it is reordering the natural world.

Draped like a verdant shawl over Costa Rica's Tilarán Mountains, the Monteverde cloud forest has long been a nature lover's idyll. Hidden birds flirt to the whisper of rushing streams and epiphytes tumble from the mist, while delicate flowers bloom impossibly from the jungle's maw. With luck you might even catch the iridescent flash of the resplendent quetzal, the elegant symbol of the Central American rain forest.

There's one member of this pageant that won't be turning up, however: the Monteverde harlequin frog. Named after its palette of yellow, red and black, this miniature amphibian—a member of the genus Atelopus—had thrived in these Costa Rican mountains for perhaps a million years. Yet the last time

J. Alan Pounds, an ecologist who has studied the cloud forest's wildlife for 25 years, spotted one in Monteverde was in 1988. Its cousin, the golden toad, went missing about the same time. Indeed, the more scientists search, the grimmer the situation looks. A study by 75 scientists published earlier this year in the journal Nature estimated that two thirds of the 110 known species of harlequins throughout Central and South America have vanished.

...The trouble at Monteverde only heightened a mystery that had scientists stumped for years: why do whole species of wildlife disappear in apparently pristine parks and nature preserves? There had been no shortage of theories to explain the demise of the harlequins, from acid rain to an overdose of ultraviolet rays. By the late nineties, attention shifted to the chytrid fungus outbreaks, which many amphibian experts concluded were the smoking gun. But Pounds wasn't satisfied. After all, it wasn't just harlequins, but all kinds of amphibians that were dying. And if the chytrid disease was killing the frogs, what was behind the deadly outbreak?

In time, Pounds learned that the fungus flourished in the wet season and turned lethal in warm (17 to 25 degrees Celsius) weather—exactly the conditions that climate change was bringing to the cloud forest. More important, he found that 80 percent of the extinctions followed unusually warm years. "The disease was the bullet killing the frogs, but climate was pulling the trigger," says Pounds. "Alter the climate and you alter the disease dynamic."

...On the ground, Pounds's team has noticed a dramatic decline in the population of lizards, and some snakes like the cloud-forest racer and the firebellied snake, which once fed on the harlequin frogs. The loser, again, looks to be the quetzal, which is already capturing fewer frogs and lizards—a key protein and calcium source for its nestlings. "When interactions between species are disrupted, the outcome can sometimes be devastating," says Pounds.

...Pests are the big winners in a warming world. A parasite called the nemotode, which dies off in the heat, has compensated by breeding faster, which causes fertility to plunge, or even death, among infected wild musk oxen. A kidney disease has flourished in the warming streams of Switzerland, ravaging trout stocks. Meanwhile, the oyster parasite, a scourge to shell fishermen in Chesapeake Bay, has crept all the way to Maine because of milder winters. Though there's little hard science linking climate change to farm pests, most agricultural experts say it's a matter of connecting the dots. "There is good evidence that warmer conditions favor more invasive species," says David Pimentel, who studies invasive plants and pests at Cornell University. "Invasive plants can compete with native varieties and cause extinctions."

...One of the most besieged of all the specialists is the polar bear, which hunts seal from floating chunks of sea ice. Warmer currents in the Arctic Ocean have hastened the breakup of ice floes and forced the bears to swim greater distances for their meals, putting them at risk of drowning or starving. Already bear watchers say the average weight of polars in Hudson Bay has dropped from 295kg to 230kg—near the threshold below which they stop reproducing. Polar bears now top most green groups' endangered lists.

More than polar bears will be in trouble if atmospheric temperatures rise two more degrees—far from the worst-case climate forecasts. The Greenland ice shelf would melt, posing a threat to a whole web of life that depends on ice, including plankton, which feed fish, which are eaten by seals, which are meals for both polar bears and Inuk hunters. In the Southern Hemisphere, many researchers have already linked sharp declines in penguins like the rock hopper, Galápagos, blackfoot, Adélie and the regal emperor to warmer ocean currents, which have flushed away staple food supplies like krill, a coldwater crustacean.

The loss of creatures is alarming enough. What about losing an entire ecosystem? For most of the last two decades, Stephen Williams, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Australia, has been studying the evolutionary biology of the Australian rain forests. The sprawling experiment was meant to plot how wildlife evolved in the mountainous cloud forests along the coast of northeast Queensland, where thousands of unique animal and plant species have thrived for 5 million years. But when Williams ran his data through a computer model, testing for a modest rise in world temperatures (3.5 degrees Celsius over a century), he was floored. By 2100, his team concluded, up to 50 percent of all species would be gone. "I expected to see an impact, but this was shocking," says Williams.

(The same issue has a related article - Oceans: Last Chance for Fish)

Meanwhile - this new bird species was found in Columbia. Dubbed the Yariguíes brush finch, the small bird was first found in 2004 in an isolated region of the eastern Andes mountain range known as the Serranía de los Yariguíes.

And one in India. Named Bugun liocichla, the small bird is described as a type of babbler, a diverse family of birds that usually live in tropical forests.

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It's a small thing - but we just finished our frog ponds. When we moved into this place 3+ years ago - (it having been abandoned) there were hundreds of tadpoles and one big frog in the bottom of the old above-ground pool. We didn't want to mess around with a pool - but I liked the idea of having the frogs - so we got rid of the pool and replaced it with frog ponds. There is one frog there now - I'll be curious to see how it goes next year.