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"It Isn't Easy Being Green," Kermit the Frog: Frogs - P

© Kenneth Friedman

There are, according to experts on such things, more than 4,000 species of frogs. You'd think by now we'd have seem 'em all but that's not the case. At least 12 more have been discovered and not yet named in Australia alone, say John Barker, Gordon Grigg and Michael Tyler in an article in Reptile & Amphibian Magazine (Jan/Feb 1997).

Penn State University scientist S. Blair Hedges has identified another newly discovered frog whose name, Eleutherodactylus iberia is three times longer than the frog itself, he says. This tiny forest-dweller is threatened as people deforest for subsistence farming and fuelwood, according to Hedges.

Unfortunately, like many other species of living things, frogs are threatened by a variety of human activities including development and other forms of habitat destruction, pollutants, introduced exotic species, climate change and the thinning ozone layer. Although a few new frogs (and toads )are discovered, at the same time others are declared threatened or extinct.

In April 1992, science writer Charles Petit of the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the mountain yellow-legged frog and Yosemite toad as "missing from most of the Sierra Nevada" and the arroyo toad of Southern California as gone from three-fourths of its range. He reported on the California red-legged frog as being reduced to one "remote area of Riverside County." Today, development and exotic predators have brought this latter frog a dubious distinction: number 957 on the endangered species list.

A few states east, the western boreal toad population, listed as endangered by Colorado and awaiting listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has decreased 90 percent in the past few years and no one knows why. In a struggle to save this species, the Colorado Division of Wildlife is releasing thousands of hatchery raised toads into Rocky Mountain National Park, according to GREENlines from Defenders of Wildlife.

The threat too frogs is not confined to the United States. In Sydney, Australia, the tiny thumb-size Green and Golden Bell Frog is endangered and so rare in the state of New South Wales that people risk a substantial fine and two-year jail term for harassing one. The Sydney frog is threatened by the year 2000 Summer Olympics slated to take place in the frog's habitat, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal (8/95). Conserving this frog's habitat is apparently a problem for at least three reasons. First, it prefers disturbed trashy sites rather than the pristine, so rounding up frogs and dropping them off in the wild somewhere doesn't work. Second, the frogs need ponds unconnected to waterways inhabitated by an exotic fish that eats the frogs. Third, habitat depth is reportedly important to protect against predatory birds.