Date published: 2005/09/21
The BBC says:
The price of saving the world's frogs, toads and salamanders from oblivion will top $400m (£220m) over five years.
This is the estimated cost of a global action plan drawn up during an expert summit in Washington DC, and backed by the UN's biodiversity agency IUCN.
The money would pay for the protection of habitats, for disease prevention and captive-breeding projects, and for the ability to respond to emergencies.
About a third of all amphibian species are at a high risk of extinction.
...
According to the Global Amphibian Assessment, a vast and authoritative study which reported its findings last year, almost a third of the 5,743 known species are at risk of extinction; up to 122 have disappeared within the last 25 years.The action plan emerging from this meeting lists six major reasons behind the decline:
- habitat loss and degradation
- climate change
- chemical contamination
- infectious disease, notably the fungal infection chytridiomycosis
- invasive species
- over-harvesting
Over the three days, working groups drawn from a wide range of scientific institutions and conservation organisations have established budgets for tackling each of these issues; the overall total comes to US$404m (£223m).
So widespread and so devastating is Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the fungus responsible, that one of the main recommendations emerging in the action plan is that extensive captive-breeding programmes should be established for amphibians at particular risk.
The plan envisages that, ultimately, around 1,000 species could be preserved in this way, with specialist facilities established on every continent.
But not all delegates believe this to be an effective approach.
"Many species can't be bred in captivity," Cynthia Carey, from the University of Colorado, US, told the BBC News website, "and with 99% of the species they're looking at, we just don't know how to do it.
"You can give them the right habitat and food, but they may need specific light or heat or moisture or group size, otherwise the female won't ovulate - and it can take years to study that."
The action plan sees captive breeding as a bridge to a better era when chytridiomycosis can be beaten and the amphibians returned to the wild.
"We've been running a captive-breeding programme with the boreal toad (Bufo boreas) since 1995," said Professor Carey.
"We've tried re-introducing them to the wild seven or eight times, but every time they die within a couple of years; if you don't get rid of the fungus, all you're doing is providing it with lunch."
Well, these people are "saving the world", or at least they think so, so perhaps they should be given some grace, but as one sceptic has pointed out in the article, this exercise might just turn out to be mostly a waste of money (nothing new there).
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