Take a moment and try to think back as far as you can, back to the moment when you first remember becoming aware of frogs. For me, it was finding warty African toads that would become trapped in a pit leading to our swimming-pool filter. Enthralled, I would grab them and give them a kiss to see if they would turn into a handsome prince. At that point, they usually peed on me and when I took them inside the house to show my mum, she’d shoo me out of the house like a cat with a rat, and tell me to wash my hands because they would give me warts. Now I’d never dare to call my own wonderful mum an old wife, but thankfully I never got warts, and I’ve handled a lot of frogs.

Everybody interacts with these fascinating animals. You may love them or be creeped out by them, and if you have a lone toad croaking forlornly from the pond outside your bedroom, you might even be coming pretty close to hating them. Even though frogs are some of the most accessible wildlife out there, surprisingly little was known about their status from a conservation perspective before 2004, when the first-ever global study was conducted to look at the state of amphibians. The research uncovered a silent, previously unknown crisis.

One in three amphibians (32%) are now threatened with extinction, a rate that is higher than any other known vertebrate group. For the sake of comparison, 12% of birds and 23% of mammals are threatened globally. For the last four years, scientists and conservationists have been in a huddle trying to figure out how to save this incredibly vulnerable and biodiverse vertebrate group. The result is a comprehensive action plan that will cost nearly $100 million a year to implement.

One piece of this plan is a rescue package being lead by a consortium of zoos and aquariums around the world known as the Amphibian Ark Project which aims to raise public awareness, funding and the improve the political profile of the world’s endangered amphibians—and to get zoos to participate in captive breeding programs of the most endangered species. These captive populations will function as a true ark in the biblical sense: keeping species alive and buying some time so that in the future we will be able to restore the species in the wild. That will happen if new research breakthroughs help us to solve some of the critical threats to amphibians, such as the Chytrid fungal disease, which threatens more than 100 amphibian species globally. Unfortunately we’ve been down this road so many times before, with black-footed ferrets, whooping cranes, California condors and even bison. Now we face the daunting prospect of not just captive breeding of a single species, but rescuing an entire vertebrate assemblage.

What frogs need now is some real attention, funding and political champions. In 1905, the first director of the National Zoo William Hornaday, and US President of the time Teddy Roosevelt together founded the American Bison Society whose mission was “the permanent preservation and increase of the American bison.” Their far-sighted actions were able to pull the species back from the brink of extinction. We must learn from history’s good examples and have the same foresight in order to save frogs. Hopefully this next year—the year of the frog—will inspire everyone to band together and go out on a limb for these magnificent creatures. That includes a cohort of dedicated conservationists, philanthropists, politicians from unlikely places, as well as the general public. You can help this effort by spreading the word or buying a year of the frog calendar. Feel free to contact me if you have any ideas about how to tackle this formidable issue.

Frogs do matter! Please jump in and share your frog stories with us in the comments section.

Photographs taken by Brian Gratwicke in Turkey Hollow