By Kevin Zippel, Ph.D.
As Jamie K. Reaser, Ph.D., pointed out in “Under Fire,” amphibians are in serious trouble. At least one-third of all amphibian species are threatened with extinction, and another quarter are so rare that we call them “data deficient.” They, too, might be threatened, so 32 to 55 percent of amphibians are at serious risk of disappearing under our watch.
Some consider this threat as the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity, an extinction event in the same ballpark as the disappearance of the dinosaurs — an event the amphibians survived. Their current extinction rate is at least 200 — and possibly as high as 45,000 — times higher than at any point in their 360-million-year history.
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