Our Philosophy and Approach

We work with some of the most amazing, diverse, yet fragile creatures in the world: frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodilians. Add to that the bizare wormlike amphibians, the caecilians, as well as the peculilar legless lizards called amphisbaenians, and you have a unique cast of characters living in nearly every ecosystem on earth. Yet the reptiles and amphibians, nearly 15,000 species, are often neglected as focal points in conservation.

Ask a child what her three favorite animals are and you migh hear "lions, giraffes, and frogs".Yet there is only one species of either lion and giraffe, yet there are over 5,600 speices of frog--more than all of the species of mammal on Earth. The same biases carry through to adulthood, and the priorities for conservation efforts and funding have the same biases towards larger, and some would say cuter, animals.

So then why should we care so much about the littler contingency? For one thing, if you want to know if a population of jaguars is going to survive, you should first look at frogs. This is because frogs are "indicator species", which means that the health of frog communitiies can tell you a lot about the health of an entire ecosystem, jaguars included. Frogs are such good indicators of ecosystem health because of their skin: it is moist and permeable, so they are most exposed to environmental toxins and other environmental threats, such as global warming and habitat destruction. For these reasons, frogs and other amphibians are finally receiving just some of the attention they need, and conservation efforts and dollars are starting to come their way, albeit still lagging far behind large mammals and birds.

Most reptiles, on the other hand, with the exception of turtles, are all but neglected when it comes to conservation priorities. Of the 7,200 species worldwide, only about 18% have even been evaluated for conservation status. That leaves some 5,800 species for which we have no idea if they will survive the ongoing extinction crisis.

Our aim is to fill in the missing peices of the extinction puzzle: How many species will we lose to global warming if we don't act now? What is going to happen to all sorts of plants and animals if frogs dissapear? How many species of reptile will be lost if habitat desruction continues on its current path? And most importantly, what can we do to stem the tide of extinction, keeping in mind that if we save the frogs, we can save nearly everything else that lives with them?

If you think these things are worth knowing, consider making a donation, or getting involved today.