LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE (Columbo, Sri Lanka) 29 June 05 Leap Year (Amal Jayasinghe)
Photo available at URL following this article: Philautus Asankai, a powder-blue mountain frog, a new species discovered from Sri Lanka’s central highlands. (AFP)
Conservationists in Sri Lanka, the world's top spot for frogs, have discovered 35 new species of the amphibians -- only to find that another 19 species have died out.
Sri Lanka's Wildlife Heritage Trust, in a report to be published Thursday, blames habitat loss on the tropical island for the die-off.
"The ravages of habitat loss in Sri Lanka's once rain-forested wet zone have been severe, and there is a compelling argument for intensive conservation management of the surviving forest," the Trust's Rohan Pethiyagoda wrote in the report.
Photo: Philautua poppiae, a knuckles leaf-nesting frog, found in the Corbett's Gap area of the Knuckles Range in central Sri Lanka, a new frog species recently discovered on the island. A researcher said that Sri lanka's frog population had been challenged by extinctions, but depite the alarm, 35 new frog species have also been found, making the island one of the world's top country for frog species. (AFP)
In a decade-long study, a Wildlife Heritage Trust team found evidence of 35 new frog species, confirming the Indian Ocean island as the world's number one spot for frogs, with more than 200 known species, ahead even of rainforest-rich, biodiverse Costa Rica, Pethiyagoda told AFP.
They also found other previously unknown biodiversity -- 50 new snail species, 16 new crabs, seven new lizards and an as yet unknown species of mouse deer, he said.
"A lot of people thought we had documented all the species during the time of the British (1815-1948), but what we are discovering is that it is not the case and we are finding more," the internationally acclaimed conservationist wrote in the latest Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, to be published Thursday.
"These discoveries provide, however, little cause for jubilation," he said.
According to the World Conservation Union, 19 of the 34 amphibian species identified as extinct worldwide are from Sri Lanka, Pethiyagoda said.
Mourning the lack of effort made to protect the animals and their inland habitat, he said: "I wish they had been affected by the tsunami because then we would have got some foreign assistance for conservation."
While the December tsunami killed some 31,000 people and damaged the island's fragile coral reefs, it did not affect the frog population because they were not concentrated near coastlines as they dislike salt water, he said.
Sri Lanka may be the country with the highest number of endemic frog species, but it has also seen the fastest die-off, he said.
The timeline and the causes of the extinction of the 19 species, however, were still poorly understood, Pethiyagoda said.
"We can't be sure when exactly that happened, and we don't know for sure what caused the extinction," he said.
"It could be disease or loss of their habitat, because in this country we don't have the practice of eating frogs."
His research calls for greater conservation in Sri Lanka, where only 750 square kilometres (290 square miles) of an original 16,000 square kilometres (6,177 square miles) of rainforest remain.
Pethiyagoda said he first noticed the rich variety of Sri Lanka's frog life while studying freshwater fish and crabs in the early 1990s.
"Our unearthing of this remarkable speciosity in Sri Lanka Philautus (frogs) was accidental," Pethiyagoda wrote. The find was "indeed serendipitous", but "the evidence we present of a large scale extinction is indeed sobering."
http://www.lankabusinessonline.com/new_full_story.php?subcatcode=22&subcatname=&newscode=1316500124
MSNBC (New York, New York) 29 June 05 New tree frog species found, but others lost - Sri Lankan researchers cite loss of habitat for 19 extinctions
Colombo, Sri Lanka (Reuters): Sri Lankan biologists have found several dozen new species of tree frog over the last decade in the island’s dwindling rainforests, but warn many known species are either extinct or on the verge of disappearing because of man.
Researchers from Sri Lanka’s privately-funded Wildlife Heritage Trust found 35 new species of frog -- increasing the number of known frog species on the Indian Ocean island by a third -- but also found 19 species are now extinct.
“(They) have gone extinct largely because of the loss of their habitat ... The land has now been converted to other uses like tea and rubber,” biologist Rohan Pethiyagoda, whose team’s research has been published in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, told Reuters on Wednesday.
“The long-term prospect is pretty bleak,” he added. “We know that 11 of these species are on the brink. They are likely to disappear in the next few years unless extensive conservation measures are taken.”
Asia’s tsunami offered a small silver lining for the tiny frogs, which range from iridescent green to pale blue in color and cling to foliage with bulbous, sucker-like toes.
The Sri Lankan government has banned rebuilding on a narrow strip of land along much of the island’s coastline after December’s disaster killed nearly 40,000 people here, and the new coastal buffer zone will offer some species sanctuary.
“It’s not going to protect the vast majority of species, but it will certainly protect 10 of them, and 10 is a big number, so it will help,” Pethiyagoda said.
Sri Lanka is home to 105 species of frog, 86 of which still survive today, which compares to around 4,500 known species of frog worldwide.
But most live in the largely unprotected rainforests of Sri Lanka’s southwest, and not in the the island’s national wildlife reserves, which tend to be drier, less biologically diverse and home to large mammals such as elephants, bears and leopards.
“What is most staggering is that out of the 34 species of frogs altogether that are extinct worldwide, half should happen to be in this tiny little island,” Pethiyagoda said.
His team also found 17 new types of freshwater crabs, while fellow international researchers have also identified 50 new species of snail and seven new lizards.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8401259/
