Wave Of Rapid Frog Decline Crosses Caribbean; Threatened/Endangered 70-90% Of Some Nations' Species
EDIT
In percentage terms, the worst situation for frogs is the Caribbean, where more than 80 percent of species are threatened or extinct in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica and more than 90 percent in Haiti, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In Puerto Rico, it’s around 70 percent. “The frogs in the Caribbean are in very bad shape,” Joglar said.
One major reason the Caribbean is so vulnerable is that many species are found only within a small habitat on just one island. Take, for example, the coqui guajon, or rock frog, which was the focus of attention by Lopez and Longo on a recent night. About the size of a golf ball, it is what’s known as a habitat specialist, found only in caves of a certain kind of volcanic rock along streams in southeastern Puerto Rico.
There are 17 known spots designated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as critical habitat for the rock frog, all of them on private land. Longo and Lopez, working for a research and public education initiative called Proyecto Coqui, have been trying to determine the health of the populations on those isolated patches. “That’s why it’s such a vulnerable species,” Lopez said. “If something happens to the habitat, people can’t just grab them and put them in another place on the island because this habitat is only found on the southeast of the island.”
In densely populated Haiti, the degradation of the environment has been so severe that only a handful of species are known for certain to still be viable in the country and even they are in trouble, said S. Blair Hedges, a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied frogs in the Caribbean since the 1980s.
EDIT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/frog-species-across-caribbean-teeter-on-edge-of-extinction-in-a-sign-of-ecological-peril/2013/04/10/814748c4-a20d-11e2-bd52-614156372695_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
