Scientists try to save the frogs as time runs out

[Judi Lynn]

Scientists try to save the frogs as time runs out

&feature=player_embedded

By William Booth,
Sunday, December 30, 9:02 PM

EL VALLE, Panama — In moist, mossy rooms, rows of glass aquariums bathed in eerie light shelter the last of the last of the frogs. It is a secure facility, for here reside the sole survivors of their species, rescued from the wild before a modern plague swept through their forests and streams in a ferocious doomsday event that threatens the planet’s amphibians with extinction.

The lab smells like a junior-high locker room where the bleach is losing. Perhaps it is all the crickets, larvae, flies — the food that is keeping the frogs alive. They are safe, at least for now, in what scientists are calling an “amphibian ark.”

But time is running out.

The frogs have been captives for five or six years, and frogs do not live forever.

The caretakers hope they will be able to encourage these finicky, exotic, mysterious captives to breed, and then return their progeny — somehow, someday, somewhere — to the wild.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/scientists-try-to-save-the-frogs-as-time-runs-out/2012/12/30/3ac5ffec-48c3-11e2-8af9-9b50cb4605a7_story.html

[tavalon]

1. I knew the frogs were endangered

I didn't realize it was because of virus.

Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance.

[secondwind]

2. sometimes I wonder why we should be bringing forth children.........

[daschess1987]

3. I've been telling people about this since Y2K...

Thanks for keeping the word out about it. The dude in the clip looks like Matt Damon, huh?

[JimDandy]

4. K & R

I remember seeing golden frogs in Panama when I was a girl. Poisonous but beautiful. They were endangered then. Now they are nearly extinct. The Panamanians made beautiful gold jewelry depicting the frogs (toads really). My mother was presented with one as a gift before we left Panama. Hope this program works.