Batrachoseps stebbinsi

Los Angeles Times via kwout

The spider that eats frogs

Mountain chickens airlifted to safety

guardian.co.uk via kwout

Demand for Rarity Could Threaten Conservation Efforts

Rare plant and animal species are like rare stamps or coins: they are perceived to be inherently more valuable to people, whatever they look like. Researchers Elena Angulo and Franck Courchamp have found that people are more attracted to species labeled “rare” than those labeled “common” even when they do not know which species are involved. The study shows that this irrational value conferred to unknown items only for the sake of rarity is both an asset and a threat for conservation. It has been recently suggested that the value people place on rarity could lead to the extinction of rare species as we are willing to pay the high costs of exploiting the last individuals.

Many hobbies, such as ecotourism or the keeping of exotic pets, may cause this effect, known as the anthropogenic Allee effect. However, this theory relies on the untested assumption that people do indeed value rarity. To assess whether people really do value rare species more than common ones, Angulo and colleagues set up a website where visitors were told they could view one of two slideshows of images: either one containing images of “rare species” or one containing images of “common species.” No other information about the featured species was provided. When visitors downloaded a slideshow, a progress bar appeared, showing what percentage of the slideshow had been downloaded. The bar filled up after six minutes but the file still appeared to be downloading and did not open. Visitors could cancel the download at any time and were taken to an error page, which would then link them back to the slideshow download page to try again (although the slideshows never opened).

The researchers measured: a) how attractive the rare slideshow was to the visitors (based on the proportion of visitors who downloaded the rare slideshow as their first or only choice), b) how long visitors were prepared to wait to download each slideshow and c) how perseverant visitors were (how many times they tried to download each slideshow before giving up). Even though visitors knew nothing about which species each slideshow contained, more people opted to view the rare species slideshow. Visitors also waited longer for the rare species slideshow to download before giving up than they did for the common species slideshow and after the download failed, they made more attempts to download the rare species slideshow than the common one. Angulo and colleagues concluded that people do value rare species more than common ones and propose that conservationists should be prudent when using rarity to promote conservation. “This is a crucial measure for the conservation of countless plant and animal species, which fall victim to a growing international trade of fuel collections, exotic pet, traditional medicine or luxury markets,” explain the researchers.

Rare Species Are Valued Big Time. 2009 PLoS ONE 4(4): e5215

Think different

Frognet, the venerable dartfrog email list, is a funny beast. It goes dormant for long periods of time, but just when you think it's died, it comes roaring back with top class discussions that really make you think.

That's exactly what's happened in the last week with an interesting discussion about vivarium design and substrates (the latter being a perpetual topic on Frognet). The part I was interested in concerned flow-through vivarium designs which water drains continuously from the viv rather than collecting in the substrate. This rapidly gathered the strapline "Your frog is a sponge", the idea being that flow-through substrates remain "cleaner", which is beneficial to frogs.

As ever, the sides in this debate involved more emotion and intuition than scientific evidence, but the thought that cleaner substrates and lack of stagnant water mean healthier frogs is an attractive argument. My vivaria are not set up for flow through, and ripping my frogroom apart to install drains just isn't going to happen, especially since it's clearly not essential (as my frogs have told me over many years). But that doesn't mean that I haven't taken something from the debate. Although I periodically used to flush and siphon out my substrates, I've resolved to do this more frequently, at least once a month.

I'm a huge fan of using your nose to diagnose the condition of a vivarium or aquarium (aiming for an "earthy" smell rather than something you would describe as excessively stale or "smelly"). Interestingly, the water I siphoned out of different vivaria smelt quite differently, better in some cases than others, but because I'm sure this will do no harm, this has now become a more regular part of my maintenance regime.

In another part of the Frognet thread, one of my frogkeeping gurus, Brent Brock, put forward one of his favourite theories - diversity is good. In this case, Brent was advocating that vivarium "health" is supported by having the biggest diversity of plant species possible. In addition to fast growing, nutrient hungry species, slower growing plants also play an important role by potentially absorbing different compounds. Although Brent admits that it's easier to do this in bigger vivs (and Brent's vivs are pretty big) than smaller ones, it's still influenced my thinking, and I've moved a few cuttings around this morning.

Change for change's sake is generally a bad thing, but sometimes, it pays to think different.

Cyclorana platycephala, the water holding frog

Your Easter Treat: The Thin Green Line

It is the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs. Population by population, species by species, amphibians are vanishing off the face of the Earth. Despite international alarm and a decade and a half of scientists scrambling for answers, the steady hemorrhaging of amphibians continues like a leaky faucet that cannot be fixed or a wound that will not heal. Large scale die-offs of frogs around the world have prompted scientists to take desperate measures to try to save those frogs they can, even bathing frogs in Clorox solutions and keeping them in Tupperware boxes under carefully controlled conditions to prevent the spread of a deadly fungus. Will it ever be safe to return the frogs back to the ecosystem from which they were taken? Video:

Froglife is metamorphosing

Froglife and The Herpetological Conservation Trust (The HCT) have announced their intention to merge, forming a single conservation organization. The new organisation will be called the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust and will continue the range of activities currently undertaken by Froglife and the HCT, while providing a stronger basis for conserving amphibians and reptiles in the future.

"Both Froglife and the HCT have worked closely on key issues in recent years, including the Government’s Biodiversity Action Plans, on issues like amphibian disease and on advice and guidance for the public and land-managers. Throughout this time it has become increasingly clear that the two organisations could be many times more effective in their mutual aim of conserving amphibians and reptiles, if united as a single organisation."

Pretty Worms

If you live your life underground, why would you want to be brightly coloured? In the case of caecilians, amphibians with earthworm-like bodies that spend most of their lives underground, some of the colouration may have been retained from distant ancestors which lived above ground. However, many caecilians are dark-coloured on top and ligherter underneath, which could protect them from predators if they are accidentally exposed at the surface or if they temporarily emerge at night. Some of the brightly-coloured caecilians could also be toxic, although the colours might just be a bluff! We know so little about this group of animals that it is very difficult to be sure.

Physalaemus pustulosus, the mud puddle frog