Scientists Build an Ark To Save Jungle Amphibians

Peace Corps Online writes "In the 1980s a deadly fungus called chytrid appeared in Central America and began moving through mountain streams, killing as many as 8 out of 10 frogs and extinguishing some species entirely. (The fungus has little effect on any other vertebrates.) Now a returned Peace Corps volunteer and her husband have opened the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in western Panama to house more than 600 frogs as chytrid cuts a lethal path through the region. Experts agree that the only hope of saving some of the more endangered, restricted-range species is to collect animals from remaining wild populations, establish captive breeding programs, and be prepared to conduct reintroduction projects in the future. But before reintroduction can even begin, scientists must find some way to overcome the chytrid in native habitats using vaccines, breeding for resistance, or genetic engineering of the fungus. Conservationists are budgeting for 25 years of captive breeding, long enough, they believe, to allow some response to chytrid to be found. 'There are more species in need of rescue than there are resources to rescue them,' says Amphibian Ark's program director. 'When you're talking about insidious threats like disease or climate change, threats that can't be mitigated in the wild, there's simply no alternative.'"

Comments

sentimental fools

[Potor]

This is pure sentimentalization of nature. Are we going to protect gazelles from cheetahs next?

Re:sentimental fools

[maxume]

Probably yes. If only because the Gazelles are likely to taste better to humans than the cheetahs.

(Providing a nice herd for hunting is one of the primary reasons for wolf control in the somewhat less populated areas of North America...the other is that lots of people want to live by trees and grass, but not by big dangerous animals)

Really, I don't see the problem with getting sentimental about nature, as long as it doesn't cost a lot. It makes more sense than getting sentimental about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, and there are plenty of people who do that.

Re:Evolution stymied?

[MichaelSmith]

The problem is that we could be causing this disease to spread. One reason which has been put forward is that frog researchers who go from country to country are spreading diseases. So saving frogs in this instance may be more a case of fixing the damage we have done.

Re:Evolution stymied?

[Sidshow]

Yes, researchers likely have caused the damage, but what people forget is that humans are part of nature.

If the frogs your researching can't handle the act of you researching them then you have just evolved yourself out of a job. These researchers like the frogs in the wild need to adapt, find new work, or perish along with there beloved research subjects.

Re:Nature

[physicsphairy]

Humans are virtually incapable of making realistic cost-benefit analyses of these type of situations. There is so much genetic material phasing into and out of existence, human beings could not begin to comprehend it all. However, a single species is easy enough to comprehend, and so by being considered at all it gets a fairly disproportionate representation in the grand scheme of earth's ecosystem. (and I guess the 'conservationists' are not so sentimental about fungus as frogs)

I think it is interesting that their long-term solution is either to attack the fungus (basically performing a total reversal of natural selection through human intervention) or to preserve the frogs and provide the frogs with some kind of immunity. Of course, nature *already has* an paradigm for immunity, the principle mechanism of which is to let all the organisms that lack intrinsic biological defenses to be killed off.

Well I'm going to build an ark to save chytrid

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're going to save one species, we must save them all.