EXTINCTION IN OUR TIMES : GLOBAL AMPHIBIAN DECLINE

For over 350 million years, thousands of species of amphibians have lived on earth, but since the 1990s they have been disappearing at an alarming rate, in many cases quite suddenly and mysteriously. What is causing these extinctions? What role do human actions play in them? What do they tell us about the overall state of biodiversity on the planet? In Extinction in Our Times, James Collins and Martha Crump explore these pressing questions and many others as they document the first modern extinction event across an entire vertebrate class, using global examples that range from the Sierra Nevada of California to the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Joining scientific rigor and vivid storytelling, this book is the first to use amphibian decline as a lens through which to see more clearly the larger story of climate change, conservation of biodiversity, and a host of profoundly important ecological, evolutionary, ethical, philosophical, and sociological issues.


Author - 

James P. Collins is Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment at the School of Life Life Sciences, Arizona State University, and the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation. 

Martha L. Crump is Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University and the author of Headless Males Make Great Lovers.

SAMPLE CUSTOMER REVIEW

1) Complete coverage of a complex phenomenon - The authors have accomplished something spectacular here. They have taken a very disturbing and complex story---that has its share of intertwined controversies, to be sure---and assembled a remarkably objective and even-handed summary. The book doesn't foolishly proclaim to have solved all the mysteries, nor offer a silver-bullet panacea for the amphibian crisis. Rather it presents a fully readable retrospective and current review of the crisis of amphibian declines and extinctions and an interesting perspective on how science as a process, and the scientists as people, responded to an unprecedented set of circumstances. The authors do an especially good job at maintaining full objectivity in the face of ongoing controversies and disagreements among scientists. Similarly, to treat fairly the scientists and hypotheses that time has shown to have been "wrong"---or, better said, the ideas and conclusions that are not supported by all of the accumulated data. The nice style adopted by the authors throughout the book is to simply point out which hypotheses are the best supported by the data. There are no "winners" or "losers" among the people and ideas presented in this book, as the authors imply that all contributions to the amphibian crisis have been important.

We have a long way to go in understanding and confronting the ecological catastrophe of global amphibian declines and extinctions. But this book is a complete summary of where we've been and where we are positioned today in this phenomenon. Importantly, the authors also pay especial attention to how we got to our current position of knowledge and conservation action. This aspect of the book makes for a fascinating study of how a completely unorganized cohort of scientists responded when the found themselves suddenly in the face of an overwhelming conservation challenge. In retrospect, the scientists responded quite slowly. But after reading this book, you will realize that no other response was possible.
I hope this book is read carefully by scientists, conservationists, and policymakers working on other aspects of the global environmental crisis. This case study of the amphibian crisis offers many lessons applicable to other biodiversity crises, be it fungal infections in bats or die-offs of coral reefs. The book also offers a complete overview of the phenomenon of amphibian extinctions. I wish all reporters and science writers covering the subject would give this a careful read before beginning their stories! Kudos to the authors for a remarkable and easily absorbable synthesis of a very complex story.

By J. R. Mendelson on August 3, 2009

2) Nice historical overview - The great decline of amphibians was very much in the news during the early 1990's, but since then, not much is heard in the popular press about this issue. Did the problem go away? Did science ever figure out what the cause was? Or has the cause been found and a solution been put into place? Colony colapse disorder and a great decline in honey bees and other pollinators is now very much in the news, and I was curious if there were any similarities between these two cases, where each represented a whole category of animals that were disappearing globally. Also, it is very difficult to measure populations of both amphibians and bees. In particular, the activity of these animals is very much affected by weather, and their populations fluctuate greatly. For some species, you can only find them after a particular weather event, or during the right time of day, at the right time of the year. I was curious how anyone knew that the amphibians were in decline. Last but not least, I knew that a pathogen had been determined to be the 'cause' for the amphibian declines, yet a considerable research effort continues towards determining how various other factors affect amphibian declines, including global warming and habitat loss. So I was curious, is the disease theory widely accepted by herpatologists, nor not? Or are these factors somehow intertwined, with the causes for the declines being more complex than a global epidemic of some sort? This book answers these questions, and it is nicely written in an easy to follow format using an historical prespective: describing how the problem was discovered, how herpatologists rounded up the political support to get the research funding needed to work on finding a solution, how the causes for the declines were elucidated, and where the frogs and salamanders are at today. If you are interested in conservation biology, you will find this an interesting story. It is The Rest of the Story, what happened after the newspapers quit reporting.

By Rose on July 4, 2011

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Extinction in Our Times: Global Amphibian Decline