Frog goes extinct, media yawns
Frog goes extinct, media yawns
Is the loss of a unique life form on Earth big news? Not according to most media outlets. But how can the public care about global mass extinction if they aren’t even told about its victims?
Jeremy Hance
Thursday 27 October 2016 03.23 EDT
On 26 September, staff with the Atlanta Botanical Garden found a frog dead in his enclosure. The frog had big brown eyes, massive feet with thick webs between the toes, and brownish skin speckled with little yellow dots. His name was Toughie. He was big for a frog and he didn’t like it when humans handled him. He’d lived a long time: 12 years.
And he was the last of his kind.
On 26 September 2016, the world very likely lost Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) to extinction. The species, only discovered by scientists in 2005, lived in Panama before it was wiped out in the wild by habitat destruction and the amphibian disease, chytridiomycosis. The last one was heard calling in the wild in 2007. But before this, a small number of Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog had been taken into zoological facilities for captive breeding. Unfortunately, the attempt failed. Toughie was the last to die.
Despite the fact that we can actually trace the extinction of Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog to an exact date, it occurred with very little media interest. Sure, the species’ demise was covered by many standard science media sites, such as Scientific American, National Geographic, and Mongabay.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2016/oct/27/rabbs-fringe-limbed-treefrog-frog-amphibians-extinct-extinction-media
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