Ten new amphibian species discovered

As the worldwide amphibian decline continues, it's good to know that new species are still being discovered.

In the past 20 years, frogs and other amphibians have been dying in alarming numbers. More than 40 percent of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, according to the most recent IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The main causes are habitat destruction, climate change, and a sinister new fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, there’s been a surge in discoveries of new species in recent years. “Once it became apparent that amphibians were declining, there was a great interest in amphibians,” said biologist David Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who founded Amphibiaweb, a database to catalog new amphibian species. ”When we started it in 2000, we thought that the age of amphibian discovery was pretty well done,” said Wake. But now, about 2.5 new species are added every week.

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