San Diego

A website designed to describe all amphibian species was launched last week as part of the efforts of an international task force to promote research into the decline in amphibian populations.

The website (http://www.amphibiaweb.org) is the latest project by members of the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force, a worldwide organization of about a hundred working groups (each containing 1–20 scientists) studying the amphibians' decline.

Over the next year, the task force intends to issue a CD database that is planned to include all available data on declining amphibian species.

Frog populations have declined over the past decade, particularly in countries such as Costa Rica, Panama and Australia. As evidence of amphibian decline has mounted, fears have grown that the decline is caused by one or more global factors, including increased ionizing radiation from ozone depletion, chemical contamination, pathogens or unknown stress factors.

Amphibians are important for ecological and biodiversity studies, giving information on the ecological impact of global change, sometimes with implications for humans. Formed in 1992, the task force is a grass-roots response to declining amphibian populations. It has one employee based at the Open University in England, and can be reached through its website (http://www.open.ac.uk/OU/Academic/Biology/J_Baker/JBtxt.htm).

“The task force is a bottom-up organization that started with idealism,” says charter member David Wake, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a curator of the university's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, whose collection forms the core of the group's website.

Wake, the driving force behind the website, said the long-term goal is to develop a page for each of the nearly 5,000 species of frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians (burrowing, wormlike amphibians).

“The release of amphibiaweb.org is a plea for volunteers,” says Wake. “If scientists see a species missing, help us start a page.”

After six years as chairman of the task force, Ron Heyer, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, is stepping down this spring. His successor is expected to be James Hanken, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and herpetology curator at the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Balloting began last week on Hanken's appointment. The handover of responsibilities is expected to take place in June, when scientists meet in La Paz, Mexico, for the annual conference of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and other organizations.

Reflecting on his tenure, Heyer says that the most important point was that “a consensus was reached that in fact the amphibian population decline and disappearance phenomenon is real.”

There was debate about whether the decline was a cyclical downturn, he says, but studies have convinced amphibian biologists that “something catastrophic was happening”.

A reflection of the growing interest in amphibian studies is a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to 21 investigators last autumn. Headed by James Collins, chair of biology at Arizona State University, the three-year international project will examine the role of host–pathogen biology in the decline of amphibians. Collins says that biologists “not accustomed to big science” projects will be involved in a study involving fields from molecular immunology to global climate change.

“If they answer the research questions they are asking,” says Heyer, “they will give us all the information we need to determine where disease fits in to the amphibian picture.”

There will be a session on amphibian decline at this month's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

One study at the meeting will report the discovery of chytrid fungus in salamanders in Arizona. The chytrid fungus is known to kill frogs, and may be one cause of the worldwide decline in frog populations.