yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Can We Save These Rare Toads From Extinction? | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] The WNG toad is found only in the Laramy Plains of Wyoming. It's found nowhere else in the world, and it has the maybe unfortunate distinction of being one of the most endangered amphibians in North America. I think it's the most endangered amphibian in the United States. In 2010, there was one toad that we found in the wild twice that year, so we're pretty sure there was one wild toad. Then last year, I believe they found 200 in one survey, of which they do three over the summer.

So, he's zero in, and there he is right now. There is a lot of effort that we're putting into keeping this toad on the landscape, um, because it declined so far, so fast, right before our eyes. After the population decline in the 1970s, we got down to only about 10 wild individuals, which is when we took them into captive breeding.

The recovery plan for the Wyoming toad has been in effect since the mid-80s. We've got captive breeding, um, and we attempt to maintain genetic diversity. We've been doing a lot of scientific research out here to try and determine what habitat they need, trying to improve the diet of the captive breeding [Music] individuals, because it declined before we really knew much about it. What it needed, trying to understand what was needed for recovery is limiting.

The biggest thing that's hitting the toad right now that we're really trying to understand is a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, um, which is actually devastating amphibian populations around the world. You have to adapt, you have to be flexible, you have to learn to change your strategies. So, that's a big part of our monitoring and recovery plan right now is trying to understand, um, if there are ways to battle chytrid, um, which unfortunately is a brand new branch of science. We're learning so much.

Reintroductions are often misunderstood as far as a conservation technique. Many people think it's very easy to reintroduce an animal; that you simply take a captive-bred animal, put it back out into the wild, and then it will thrive and flourish and reproduce. Oftentimes, it's much more difficult than that. It's extremely complicated.

One of our main objectives, of course, is to prepare them for being in the wild. Our 900 toadlets, for one feeding per day, would go through 27,000 crickets per week, and we feed them usually twice a day, most every day. Giving them as much possible diversity of food is good for several reasons because, for one, it develops a bigger search image. So basically, anything that moves they'll try to eat versus if only if it looks like a cricket, they'll try to eat it.

For the soft releases, we keep them in a 1 and 1/2 by 1 and 1/2 M outdoor enclosure. We try to make it as nice as possible. We want the transition into the wild as easy and stress-free as possible. It's filled up with some microhabitat sites, a water bowl, and there's a nice gradient of dry to wet. They get, uh, lots of dirt they can burrow in, thick foliage to hide in, and this is very different from the captive environment in which they were raised.

People don't understand, "Okay, you know, the world is changing, and the toad didn't cut it. And, you know, why are we working so hard to save it and spending so much money?" Part of the problem is that humans are changing the landscape, and I think that we have a responsibility to try and protect those that we harm through our activities. But also, you know, back to just biodiversity is important; it keeps us healthy, so we should have an invested interest in the animals around us.

We have eliminated the immediate risk of extinction, and now we have a vibrant captive population. Now we're trying to turn that captive population into a vibrant wild population.

More Articles

View All
Conservation of energy | Physics | Khan Academy
We place a ball on this ramp, and we want to now figure out what happens to the speed of the ball as it goes forward. If you try to do this using forces and accelerations, it’s going to be really tough. But instead, we’re going to use energy conservation …
Silicon Valley's Cargo Culting Problem
The idea that superficially copying Uber and copying the things that they said in interviews, pretending that you’re Travis, whatever, yes, doesn’t work. It’s just like wearing a black turtleneck does not make you Apple. Yeah, this is Michael Cyborg with…
6 WORST Villains EVER!
Vsauce. Michael here today with a special video. It’s a Skype conversation I had with Newt from Underbelly, where he teaches me about six actual villains from real comic books that are really, really lame. He’s joined by a bunch of ladies from Underbelly,…
Lecture 7 - How to Build Products Users Love (Kevin Hale)
All right, so um when I talk about making products users love, um what I mean specifically is like how do we make things that has a passionate user base that um our users are unconditionally um wanting it to be successful both on the products that we buil…
Success is a 5 Step Process
If you want to succeed, understand the five-step process. What I mean by the five-step process is first, you need to know your goals. That means you need to prioritize and find out what do you really want and what are you going after. On the journey to t…
Economic profit for a monopoly | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to think about the economic profit of a monopoly firm. To do that, we’re going to draw our standard price and quantity axes. So, that’s quantity and this is price, and this is going to of course be in dollars. We can first thin…