It turns out that a lot of frog species are likely on the brink of extinction:
According to the IUCN, more than one-third of the world’s 6,000 amphibian species are threatened with extinction. Their permeable skins make them sensitive to environmental changes, including habitat destruction, climate change and water pollution caused by fertilizer runoff and pesticides.
“It’s the canary in the coal mine kind of thing,” said James Sirch, education coordinator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and leader of the chapter co-hosted by the museum and Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Conn. As the environment changes, the frogs will let us know, he said.
If you didn’t know, canaries really were used in the past in coal mines to help the miners know when oxygen levels in the mine had dropped too low. If the canary dropped, that meant get the heck out of the mine before you did too. So that’s similar to how the survival (or not) of frog species becomes a critical environmental indicator.
But is it hard to get trained to recognize the different frog calls? On the next page, we’ll explore that…
[nextpagelink][/nextpagelink]