Growing up in Zimbabwe, I regularly hunted in the flooded grassland systems around Harare for the legendary, rat-eating Giant-African bullfrogs. These huge amphibians look like Jabba the Hut and can inflict a nasty bite. My herpetology professors assured me that they should be abundant, while early European settlers in the region complained that they could not get to sleep because of the incessant “whooping” of giant frogs. Yet in five years of hard “frogging,” I never found, or heard a single Giant Bullfrog. Possible reasons for their disappearance include heavy pesticide use in surrounding agricultural areas, habitat fragmentation, and construction of roads- there are many unseemly jokes that still float around Harare about drivers and flattened bullfrogs.

Monte Verde Golden toads are about as charismatic as frogs come. The golden toad was first described in 1966, and just 23 years later it became extinct. The 5 cm long males looked like they had been dipped in day-glo orange paint. What is interesting about this story is that the animals went extinct in a well-protected, intact cloud forest preserve in Costa Rica. Researchers studying the frogs at the time said that unusually hot, dry periods resulting from the El-Nino Southern Oscillation caused the breeding pools of the frogs to dry up before the tadpoles could turn into frogs, and subsequently concluded that this was the first documented extinction that could be directly linked to global warming.

Researchers in Australia suspect that a fungal chytrid disease may have been responsible for the extinction of one of the world’s most unusual frogs – the Gastric-brooding frog which raised its tadpoles in its stomach. The fungal disease is now spreading like wildfire throughout Australia and the Americas and threatens up to 30% of all the amphibians in the world. Conservationists seeking to stop extinctions caused by this lesion-producing skin fungus have decided that one of the only options available to them is to take threatened, disease-free populations into captivity in a multi-million dollar effort that has been dubbed the “Amphibian Ark.”

What has happened—to the Giant bullfrogs in Harare, Golden Toads in Costa Rica, and Gastric-brooding frogs in Australia—is just the tip of the iceberg. Nine amphibian species have gone extinct since 1980, and 113 species have not been found recently in the wild despite intensive searches. According to the first ever global amphibian assessment, 32.5% of the world’s 1,800-odd species of frog are threatened with extinction. Like canaries in a coal-mine, the global amphibian crisis is a warning telling us how badly damaged our planet is.

The optimist in me hopes that the amphibians taken into the ark can be released into the wild one day, because there just isn’t sufficient room in the ark to be Noah for every species. One thing I do know is that conservationists can’t do this alone; we need financial and political support from everyone, and real lifestyle changes from you that reduce your individual human footprint on the environment.

Brian Gratwicke is a regular contributor to davidmixner.com. More about Brian can be found at www.briangratwicke.com.