Speech Story

The Amphibian Decline

The Zoology Club held its last meeting Wednesday night and Andrew Storfer, a biological sciences professor at WSU, was the guest speaker.

The topic that Storfer focused on was the amphibian decline of frogs throughout the world, but went into much more detail about the amphibians in North and South America.

Storfer started out his speech by talking about a brief history of frogs and some interesting facts that scientists had done with frogs back in the 80s and 90s.

Back in the 80s, scientists didn’t realize that amphibians were heading towards extinction as fast as they thought. The Golden Toad disappeared and this brought much attention to many scientists throughout the world, they eventually held a conference and many scientists were able to concur that some sort of amphibian in their region was moving towards extinction.

However, much of the surprising facts and details started to spill their way out when he Storfer made a comment about a new book that has just come out.

Storfer didn’t mention the title of the book but in it is a survey that was conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which is an amphibian specialist group. The IUCN conducted this survey and found out that 43% of all amphibians’ population is declining.

Not only is the amphibians population declining this drastically, less than 1% of all amphibian species show a population increase and already 180 amphibian species have gone extinct.

Chase Sanderson, a student at WSU, was surprised by these facts.

“I figured that frogs would be down towards the bottom of the food chain,” Sanderson said. “But I didn’t expect 180 species to be extinct already and less than a percent to be increasing.”

Storfer went on to talk about some of the reasons that have contributed to this amphibian decline and how they will continue to affect the amphibians.

“There are six hypotheses that have caused this amphibian decrease in population,” Storfer said. “These hypotheses are habitat destruction, invasive species, over exploration, global climate change, contaminants, and emerging diseases.”

These causes have been contributed by natural causes and the human population.

Storfer went into detail about a problem of the extinction rate in particular which is over exploration. An interesting fact was brought up during the speech: 95% of peoples demand for frogs is taken from the wildlife. This can be the demand for frogs as food, pets, collecting, etc.

Zoology club member Jennifer Conne found this statement interesting.

“I can’t believe that 95% of frogs are taken from the wildlife,” Conne said. “I thought there might have been frog farms or something, no wonder they are decreasing so quickly.”

Amphibians are very important to the environment and many people don’t realize this. Storfer made a comment about if that amphibians go extinct, there is going to be a lot more insects in the world.

The speech was held at 6:30 p.m. at the Eastlick Building Lobby.

Sources

Andrew Storfer – astorfer@wsu.edu 509-335-7922
Chase Sanderson – 253-332-3821
Jennifer Conne – jconne@wsu.edu

3 Questions for speaker

• What got you so involved in amphibians and their populations?
• What is one thing you hope to achieve in the amphibian world or for the amphibians?
• Which one of the hypotheses do you think has led to the greatest amount of population decline?