Amphibians in the Mine

AMPHIBIANS IN THE MINE

by Arthur Firstenberg, cellphonetaskforce.org/

“Amphibians were here when the dinosaurs were here, and they survived the age of mammals. If they’re checking out now, I think it is significant.”

– David Wake, Director of the Museum
of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California,
Berkeley, 1990

Communication towers inside Monteverde Cloud
Forest Biological Preserve

They are ancient animals with abilities to survive beyond belief. They live both in water and on land. They can breathe through their skin. They can regenerate limbs and organs. They don’t get cancer. They have been around for 365 million years, and have survived four mass extinctions during the history of life on Earth. Yet today, they are disappearing more rapidly than any other class of animals. By their death, they are screaming: Turn off your cell phones! Now, before it is too late!

Even before cell phones, the proliferation of radio  and TV towers, radar stations, and communication antennas in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s began killing off these most hardy, well-adapted, and important forms of life. 

• The northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens – the North American green frog that croaked from every marsh, pond and creek when I was growing up — was already extremely rare by the end of the 1980s.

• In the Colorado and Wyoming Rocky Mountains, boreal toads used to be so numerous that, in the words of Paul Corn of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, “You had to kick them out of the way as you were walking down the trail.” By 1990 they were difficult to find at all. 

• Boreal chorus frogs on the shores of Lake Superior, once innumerable, were extremely rare by 1990.

• In the 1970s David Wake could turn up eighty or more salamanders under the bark of a single log in a pine forest near Oaxaca, Mexico. In the early 1980s he returned and was able to find maybe one or two after searching the forest all day.

• Until 1979 frogs were abundant and diverse at the University of São Paulo’s field station at Boracea, Brazil, according to Stanley Rand of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. But when he returned in 1982, of thirty common frog species, six had disappeared entirely and seven had decreased in number drastically.

• In 1974 Michael Tyler of Adelaide, Australia discovered a new frog species that brooded its young in its stomach. It lived in a 100-square-kilometer area in the Conondale Ranges, 60 kilometers north of Brisbane, and was so common that he could collect a hundred in a single night. By 1980 it was extinct.

• The golden toad lived only in a 320-acre stunted forest in Costa Rica’s supposedly pristine, protected Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. In the early 1980s Marc Hayes of the University of Miami typically counted 500 to 700 males at one of the species’ breeding sites. After 1984 that site never had more than a dozen males. At another site Martha Crump observed a thousand males in 1987, but only one in 1988 and another single male frog in 1989. Today the species is extinct.

In 1990, when I began researching this magical class of vertebrates, there were not many amphibians left in all of Europe. Out of more than five thousand known species worldwide, about a dozen were doing well.

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