By Michael Greshko 10 May 2018 (National Geographic) – Many of the world’s amphibians are staring down an existential threat: an ancient skin-eating fungus that can wipe out entire forests’ worth of frogs in a flash.This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring […]
By Malia Wollan 18 July 2017 (The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain […]
Mutated tomato (left) from Mata-Hyun, compared with normal tomato (right). 15 July 2013 (MSN) – It might be wise to steer clear of vegetables from Japan’s Fukushima area for, oh, say a few hundred years. A Korean website assembled this image collection of produce from towns and villages surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. […]
Median arrival dates of (a) autumn-breeding urodeles, (b) winter-breeding anurans, (c) winter-breeding urodeles and (d) spring-breeding anurans. Closed symbols with solid trend lines indicate significant shifts in breeding phenology at α = 0.05 level. Note that data points were offset in panel (b) for clarity. Climate change has had a significant impact globally on the […]
By Maggie Fox; editing by Todd EasthamWed Dec 15, 2010 WASHINGTON Dec 14 (Reuters) – Climate change is affecting the breeding cycles of toads and salamanders, researchers reported on Tuesday, in the first published evidence of such changes on amphibians. They documented that two species were breeding later in the autumn than in years past, […]
(University of California – Berkeley) Amphibian populations have dropped worldwide, but most studies have detailed only the effects on frogs. A new UC Berkeley study documents that salamander populations also are plummeting. The study, which looked at tropical salamanders in Central America, found that the most common salamanders in the high-elevation cloud forests 40 years […]
Up to one billion frogs are taken from the wild for human consumption each year, according to a new study. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by analysing UN trade data, although they acknowledge there is a lot of uncertainty in the figure. France and the US are the two biggest importers, with significant consumption in […]
