Alytes, 2012, 29 (1¢4): 9-12.
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Responding to the amphibian crisis: too little, too late? Simon N. Stuart IUCN Species Survival Commission The Innovation Centre, University of Bath, Carpenter House, First Floor Broad Quay, Bath, BA1 1UD, UK; <simon.stuart@iucn.org>
Before the First World Herpetological Congress in Kent, UK, in September 1989, amphibians were nowhere on the conservation radar screen. But at this first gathering of the world’s herpetologists there was an opportunity for scientists to compare notes from different parts of the world. They quickly discovered that what had been thought of as strange, local phenomena were being replicated in places as far apart as Australia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and the United States. Amphibians were disappearing in seemingly pristine environments, and often the declines were dramatic. In several cases, whole species could no longer be found, perhaps most notably the Gastric-brooding Frogs (Rheobatrachus spp.) in Australia, the Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes) of the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, and the Web-footed Coqui Eleutherodactylus karlschmidti in Puerto Rico. I was present at that seminal congress in 1989. Looking back on it, the most glaringly obvious thing is how monumentally unprepared both the research and conservation communities were. The first reports of declining amphibian populations that I can find are that of the Yosemite Toad (Anaxyrus canorus) in 1970, though this was not published until 1993 (Kagarise Sherman & Morton, 1993). And this was a recurring problem. Very little was published in the peer-reviewed literature on amphibian declines prior to 1989, despite reports of disappearances coming from several sites in Australia, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the United States, and elsewhere. Some of the earlier published reports which have received too little attention were those of Dubois (1980) on the extinction of Scutiger occidentalis in the Himalayan region of Ladakh and of Heyer et al. (1988) on declines and extinctions in southern Brazil. There was a 19-year period between the first reports of something very strange going on, and the beginning of some recognition that amphibian declines were a global phenomenon. After 1989, the publication rate of peerreviewed papers on amphibian declines exploded. As stated by Stuart et al. (2004), the scientific community ‘‘initially received the reports of declines with some scepticism, because