In this 21 March 2013 photo, Ana Longo, a researcher with Proyecto Coqui, holds a Coqui or Common Coqui (Eleutherodactylus coqui) at a tropical forest in Patillas, Puerto Rico. A familiar sound is vanishing from the Caribbean night. The bird-like peeps and chirping of frogs are fainter across the region, a decline scientists say appears to be caused by a combination of climate change, a fungus that has been killing amphibians around the world, and habitat loss. It's a global problem, but worrisome in the Caribbean because the island geography means many species exist nowhere else on earth and the loss of frogs, a principal nocturnal predator of mosquitoes, may have severe consequences for humans. Photo: Ricardo Arduengo / Associated Press

PATILLAS, Puerto Rico, 10 April 2013 (Associated Press) – A curtain of sound envelops the two researchers as they make their way along the side of a mountain in darkness, occasionally hacking their way with a machete to reach the mouth of a small cave. Peeps, tweets and staccato whistles fill the air, a pulsing undercurrent in the tropical night. To the untrained ear, it’s just a mishmash of noise. To experts tracking a decline in amphibians with growing alarm, it’s like a symphony in which some of the players haven’t been showing up. In parts of Puerto Rico, for example, there are places where researchers used to hear four species at once and they are now hearing one or two, a subtle but important change. “You are not hearing what you were before,” said Alberto Lopez, part of a husband-and-wife team of biologists trying to gauge the health of frogs on the island. Scientists report that many types of amphibians, especially frogs, are in a steep global decline likely caused by a mix of habitat loss, climate change, pollution and a virulent fungus. The downward spiral is striking particularly hard in the Caribbean, where a majority of species are now losing a fragile hold in the ecosystem. Without new conservation measures, there could be a massive die-off of Caribbean frogs within 15 years, warned Adrell Nunez, an amphibian expert with the Santo Domingo Zoo in the Dominican Republic. “There are species that we literally know nothing about” that could be lost, he said. Researchers such as Lopez and his wife, Ana Longo Berrios, have been fanning out across the Caribbean and returning with new and troubling evidence of the decline. In some places, especially in Haiti, where severe deforestation is added to the mix of problems, extinctions are possible. It is part of a grim picture overall. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found that 32 percent of the world’s amphibian species are threatened or extinct, including more than 200 alone in both Mexico and Colombia. “Everywhere we are seeing declines and it’s severe,” said Jan Zegarra, a biologist based in Puerto Rico for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. […] “We are just starting to understand the ripple down effects and the repercussions of losing amphibians,” said Jamie Voyles, a biologist at New Mexico Tech in Albuquerque and one of the principal investigators of Project Atelopus, an effort to study and protect frogs of an endangered genus in Panama. [more]

Frog species across Caribbean teeter on edge of extinction in a sign of ecological peril