A Frog Revival
From World Climate Report
About 15 to 20 years ago, folks began to notice problems in amphibian communities around the world. At first, physical deformities were being noticed and then large population declines were being documented.
The finger was initially pointed at the coal industry, with an idea that perhaps mercury was leading to the deformities. But this didn’t pan out. Next, farm practices came under fire, as excess fertilizer running off into farm ponds became the leading suspect. But that theory didn’t hold water either. Then, attention turned to the ozone hole, with the idea that increased ultraviolet radiation was killing the frogs. No luck there either.
Then came the Eureka moment—aha, it must be global warming!
This played to widespread audiences, received beaucoup media attention and, of course, found its way into Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
But, alas, this theory, too, wilted under the harsh glare of science, as new research has now pretty definitively linked an infection of the chytrid fungus to declines, and even local extinctions, of frog and toad species around the world.
Perhaps the biggest irony in all of this, is that while researchers fell all over themselves to link anthropogenic environmental impacts to the frog declines, turns out that as they traipsed through the woods and rainforests to study the frogs, the researchers themselves quite possibly helped spread the chytrid fungus to locations and populations where it had previously been absent.
Now a bit good—although hardly unexpected—news is coming out of the frog research studies. Some frog populations in various parts of the world are not only recovering, but also showing signs of increased resistance—gained through adaptation and/or evolution—to the chytrid fungus.
Thus opens a new chapter in the ongoing Disappearing Frog saga, and one that likely foretells of a hoppy ending.
The magazine New Scientist has an interesting article titled “Fungus out! The frog resistance is here” that ties together a growing number of research findings indicating that frog populations that once faced local extinction have been making a come back—even in the continued presence of the chytrid fungus.
New Scientist reports that Australian researchers are reporting that a variety of frog species from across the Land Down Under that were once devastated by chytrid infection are now re-establishing themselves in areas that they were wiped out and in some cases have even returned to numbers as large as they were prior to the chytrid outbreak.
Other researchers are finding, as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Briggs et al., 2010), that frogs in the mountains of California that were once “driven virtually to extinction” are also making a recovery even though the chytrid fungus is still present. Some populations there have apparently developed the ability to survive in the presence of low-levels of the fungus.
Evidence of a developing resistance to the chytrid fungus has also been reported in a species of Australian frogs. A study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions (Woodhams et al., 2010) looked at populations of frogs which have recovered from a chytrid infection and found indications that natural selection may have led to more resistant populations and facilitated the recovery.
All this is not to say that amphibian populations across the world have made a full and complete recovery, but it is to say that there are encouraging signs that some populations are clawing their way back through adaptation and natural selection—precisely the way things are supposed to work.
And even though global warming is no longer considered to be the guilty party (of course, exonerated with much less fanfare than it was accused), the amphibian story does show the resiliency of nature—a resiliency that is grossly underplayed or even ignored in virtually all doom and gloom presentations of the impacts of environmental change.
Something that is worth keeping in mind.
References:
Briggs, C. J., et al., 2010. Enzootic and epizootic dynamics of chytrid fungal pathogen of amphibians. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 9695-9700.
Woodhams, D.C., et al., 2010. Adaptations of skin peptide defenses and possible response to the amphibian chytrid fungus in populations of Australian green-eyed treefrogs, Litoria genimaculata. Diversity and Distributions, 16, 703-712.
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Heh, guess who was pushing the alarm about AGW and frogs back then?
but wait, there’s more….
And you can find a boatload more with a Google search
Including one blog, way back then, who said “not so fast“.
This looks a little analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The scientist influences the system he/she’s trying to measure. Scientists spreading fungus with their research boots is similar to climate scientists mucking around in the historical temperature record, sometimes obliterating the original data. The difference is that the latter are doing it intentionally.
Paul Brassey says “This looks a little analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The scientist influences the system he/she’s trying to measure. Scientists spreading fungus with their research boots is similar to climate scientists mucking around in the historical temperature record, sometimes obliterating the original data. The difference is that the latter are doing it intentionally.”
Many amphibian researchers did wonder if they were the cause of the amphibians deaths. Often, to mark a population, they toe-clip individuals. But in the past this had been a harmless endeavor. And several researchers noted that the most studied populations were often the hardest hit. The Chytrid fungus killer was new, originally from South Africa and found to live on the African clawed frog, Xenopus sp. . It had been used extensively in the biological community first as a pregnancy test, but also in studies of embryological development since the large embryo inside the clear gelatin cover is easily observed. Blaustein, who advocated ulra-violet and ozone depletion as the root of extinction, used Xenopus in his lab and it is likely several researchers did as well and likely helped to unknowingly spread the disease.
Typically a highly virulent disease kills itself if it too quickly kills it hosts. So there is a natural evolution towards a less virulent strain that is no longer lethal. Such evolution appears to have occurred in Xenopus. But newly exposed populations are devastated and if a few genetically resistant individuals survive they can repopulate and coexist. Small populations and geographically restricted species, like the Golden Toad were so small, they lacked the numbers to evolve into a resistant population, as likely happened to several other newly extinct frogs like Australia’s gastric breeding frogs.
Some populations with widespread populations that lived in warmer lowlands as well as cooler high elevations, lost only their cool dwelling populations and so maintained populations that could serve as a sources that can evolve co-existence.
It seems only the AG advocates wanted to ignore the “Heisenberg principle” and their own complicity. The advocates of the new emerging introduced disease hypothesis, advocated sterilizing their boots and equipment. They also advocated captive breeding to breed resistance and give the vulnerable species a fighting chance. The AGW advocates liked Pounds and later Blaustein never mention such precautions.However they via Nature often attacked the disease hypothesis unless it was caused by AGW. It seemed as if the AGW advocates did not want say anything that might diminish their invested AGW hypothesis.
I can only imagine when the AIDS virus was first discovered if people like Pounds and Blaustein, argued against disease prevention to further AGW as the cause of AIDS more people would have died. But the AIDS people quickly turned to education to stop the spread of AIDS, and minimized the damage. If the the same efforts towards education regards the spread of the Chytrid were similarly pushed, the several Chytrid extinctions may have been avoided. Personally I think people like Pounds and Blaustein, and Nature, who fought against the emerging disease hypothesis in order to promote AGW attribution, must shoulder some of the blame for the slowed prevention measures and preventable extinctions!
Further to Mooloo (5:14 pm).
Do alarmists like Mr Butler genuinely believe that the climate conditions throughout the Earth as represented by the mean global temperature in 1950 was the absolute optimum for all plant and animal species…..
http://www.americanthinker.com/%231%20CO2EarthHistory.gif
……that frogs, for instance, which have survived 350 million years of climate change, can be wiped out by a ~ 0.7C temperature rise?
Do they sincerely believe that the temperature rise since 1950 must be peculiarly malign because, in their belief, it is totally due to human CO2 emissions?
Wildlife biologists extirpating the very species they study is nothing new and not confined to amphibians. They have done it to birds (esp. island species such as found in Hawaii) through mist nettings, nest robbing, and various other deadly “research” practices; and to rare insects (museums such as the Smithsonian have large warehouses full of uncurated vats of now extinct arthropods).
Wildlife biologists (or ecologists, as they like to refer to themselves these days) occupy the bottom of the science barrel. Not all, just 99% of them.
Very unfortunately, the Endangered Species Act has given those bozos free rein (or reign) to destroy the economies (as well as the wildlife populations) of states and regions.
Many visitors here probably think that climate “scientists” are the principal charlatans perverting science. IMHO, the wye-byes are even more Ludditish and destructive.
20+ years they’ve been saying globull warming kills and deforms frogs!
Too bad they can’t jump high enough to be struck by 3.5 million dollar wind mill blades, like birds are. I’ve been going for walks around wind farms, I’m finding lots of crow body parts in the vicinity. Crows rarely ever get hit by cars and trucks, but appear to have a problem with midwest wind farms.
Mooloo says:
December 13, 2010 at 5:14 pm
No-one thought it was actually global warming killing jungle frogs. Half a degree on average in 50 years wipes out tropical species? It was never really a starter.
It was a nice drum to beat, because it drove along people interested in conservation. We all know the present has barely changed in terms of the range of temperatures.
The point of AGW panic is that our future is in jeopardy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our future is ALWAYS in jeopardy. However we human beings have always managed to achieve, to move forward, and to eliminate with great sacrifices that evil that inhabits a small corner of our left side of the brain and that sometimes comes to the fore and creates havoc, war, terrorism…. and bad science.
Post Berlin wall crash, the evil inside the leftist’s brain went for the science jugular (red environmentalism), killed the scientist, skinned him, put that scientist-skin on himself to impress and is now THE JEOPARDY. This is the jeopardy we have to eliminate, fast. Well its already dead actually, but still on artifical respiration with the plug being pulled by WUWT and its resident heroes.
You know, species that are not able to survive a half a degree temperature rise, how on earth then did they survive the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event?
This sort of alarmism really annoys me. I remember thinking at the time the news came out, that a likely source of infection of the frogs was the scientists looking for the fungus and even if they weren’t responsible, mass movement of people, goods and animals would be.
The environmental misdirection that follows climate change hysteria is having a terrible effect on real and preventable damage to the planet. Bad practice doesn’t change when the real perpetrators can point to CO2 and say ‘not our fault’. So the trees around Mount Kilimanjaro are still at risk; ships still wash out their bilges, releasing invasive species; spores, seeds and insects arrive in new habitats on wood, food or plants; pollution poisons coral reefs; animals are killed for food, protection or trade; people die of preventable malaria; etc.
Not just wrong, but wrong-headed.
I don’t think his comment was related to the topic of the current post. He more likely just wound up in it only because it was the uppermost thread at the time he navigated to wattsupwiththat.com to make a general comment on the whole site. He was probably inflamed by something he read at CP or RC.
The Chytrids are reducing! At this rate they will soon go extinct!
It is worse than we thought!
(sarc off)
We’ve had some very healthy frogs in our garden this year here in the UK.
I was recently staying on a farm in country Victoria (Australia) and could hear the Pobblebonk frogs in the dam. There are usually deafening masses of them in the winter Down Under; I don’t remember hearing them in early Summer before.
I believe some birds in Northern Australia have discovered how to prey on Cane toads without being poisoned, but I can’t give you the details. No doubt someone with a bit more time to spend on the internet could find out more!
Here in northern NSW, Australia, on the western (dry) side of the mountain range, living on a fairly steep hill with no normally running surface watercourses or wet areas, after ten years of serious drought, intermittent intense heat and dust storms, but also after just a couple of months of quite regular rainfall, the frogs are back. The frog cacophony is keeping me awake nights. How have they survived the last ten years? Frogs rule!
This seems to be another example of the disturbing anthropocentrism that is corrupting science. Rather than objectively look at evidence, there seems to be a reflexive action of individuals who mis-label themselves as scientists to immediately blame humans for anything negative that occurs in the area they’re studying.
It’s curious that individuals who are most likely to ridicule conservatives for disbelieving in evolution are the people least able to recognize evolution in action. What has been found in medicine is that pathogens are constantly evolving and so new diseases happen all of the time. Fortunately, human intelligence operates more efficiently than microbial evolutionary processes and we’ve stayed on top of new viral and bacterial illnesses thus far. The same biologic battle that produces new human diseases produces novel animal diseases and has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years; a species either adapts or it goes extinct. Frogs have survived numerous ice ages with far greater temperature swings than the miniscule supposedly anthropogenic contribution. One wonders how amphibians can exist at all where I live where the temperature goes from -20 C in winter to +40 C or more in summer.
I see similar examples all of the time in my medical practice where individuals immediately blame “pollution”, “environmental chemicals” and other human factors for their illnesses; people just can’t seem to grasp the concept that a very complex dissipative system like a human body has numerous innate failure modes. Needing a cause for something appears to be a primary human drive and the concept of a chaotic system appears to be foreign to a majority of humans (including scientists).
The biggest problem to amphibians are city dwellers gone rogue and become weekend hippies. This is the first sign of people having too much money and too much time on their hands so they start soul seeking and these days they have no pants left on for the AGW doom and gloom mongers, so what do they do but go out and repopulate the country side, but in this age they are more and they want all the convenience of the city as well, and they are middle class so they got a fair amount of influence.
To further the problem a lot of the weekend hippies are now becoming permanent hippies. Selling your expensive city cave and moving to a cheaper residency hut is of course very clever when hitting retirement age. However this now creates a new set of problems of convenient spell. Old dying villages with crappy old outdated everything infrastructure that has been patched beyond recognition for the past 20 years suddenly needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to support, not just weekend hippies gone permanently conserved natural mentally-challenged-village-person, but also de facto quick fix for urbanization to support a larger population, which apparently has something to do with tax being of rather import for the local, now incorporated, community.
On top of this influx of ballistically crazy hippies comes the dire need for city dumps, which pretty much spells land fill, which of course fills up the old crappy march’s (who needs ’em any how?) to build proper “green” hippie homes on, oh yes, and to support water and sewer piping, roads, and yes a bigger dump site for all that crap you ought not dump in the ground to boot.
So essentially it is a drainage problem for both the amphibians and the city dweller gone weekend hippie gone rouge and become permanently hippified into “it’s” new local habitat.
@William Howard Butler
‘I’m curious why a charlatan like you keeps spewing moronic nonsense.’
Hahaha! I too am curious why a charlatan like you, ‘William’, keeps spewing moronic nonsense . On the run, eh, son? With nothing left but ad hom abuse now? Back to your classroom and learn some science, as well as civility. Presumably you still believe in Piltdown and Phlogiston too?
[Lets put an end to this now shall we. Spit-ball contests are for those who study sand-boxes…. bl57~mod]
Scientists are still getting large grants to study the AGW effect on biodiversity and it’s not just polar bears:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/11/18/systems-modelling-for-synergistic-ecological-climate-dynamics/#comments
This is my favorite part of science. The extinction game. But there is a small flaw in the biologist mind. When finding a new specie, one seldom consider the new specie as just evolved, the newly found specie has been around for millennia; off course. But when a specie goes extinct, then it is lo and behold the horror of mankind.
The game is rigged and the dice loaded.
I had made a comment on March 7, 2010 about the irony of researchers boots spreading the fungus.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/06/global-warming-not-blamed-for-toad-extinction/#comment-338103
I further quoted:
and
William Butler, the World Resources Institute has a very impressive list of donors, including BP, Shell, Toyota, DuPont, Monsanto, Rio Tinto, Coca-Cola and around 800 others including someone with your name.
http://www.wri.org/about/donors
One of the aims of the WRI is to “protect the global climate system from further harm due to emissions of greenhouse gases”.
Why does the WRI keep spewing moronic nonsense? Are they being paid that much? Answer: Yes they are.
This post makes me wonder how many other local ‘extinctions’ and declines are caused by concerned researchers transmitting pathogens via their boots, clothes, handling etc. Simliarities with the conquistadors and other Europeans introducing new diseases to the Americas? Then they go on to blame global warming. It also makes me wonder about the lizard decline featured on WUWT earlier this year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/13/now-its-lizards-going-extinct-due-to-climate-change/
This has similarities with the Great Barrier Reef which was supposed to vanish due to coral bleaching ’caused’ by global warming [ignore algal blooms]. Yaaaaan!
As a young boy, I enjoyed the frog opera every evening. As an adult, I recall the silence that attended the absence of the band. As I now sink into middle age, the frog opera is back. Their old croaking ground (a bit of marshy land) is now a golf-estate, and my froggy opera has to compete with the skulldulling auditory emissions of sundry “urban hippies” — (as 1DandyTroll put it) who have swamped the village of my younger days.
I recall that the decline of frogs in our area was blamed on acid rain, pollution from nearby mines and industry and what not. Now the same area is 10 times more industrialized, populated and developed, and yet the frogs have re-established themselves in style.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says: “This seems to be another example of the disturbing anthropocentrism that is corrupting science… blame humans for anything negative that occurs in the area they’re studying.”
I like to call it “the science of solipsism.” Others in this thread have alluded to it. When it comes to the natural world, CAGW alarmists are full of hubris and other errors of perception.
Extinction rates lowest in 500 years:
http://townhall.com/columnists/JonathanDuHamel/2010/12/13/climate_change_and_biodiversity/page/full
[SD, good to see you back and commenting again! ~dbs]
Where have all the froggys gone – long time passing
Where have all the froggys gone – long time ago
Where have all the froggys gone – gone to Al Gore everyone
When will we ever learn, when will we ever learn?
Where have all the chytrids gone – long time morphing
Where have all the chytrids gone – on hippies legs
Where have all the chytrids gone – antifungal cremes
When we will ever learn, when will we ever learn.
Where has all the warming gone – since this summer
Where has all the warming gone – it’s too damn cold
Where has all the warming gone – gone to hockey sticks everyone
What we will never learn, what will we never learn.