By: Kathleen Sargeant,
on 4/18/2016
In many walks of life there is much talk about “disruptive” developments which bring change that shatters the established way of doing things. In relation to the conservation of biodiversity, we can see two very different developments which might have such an effect on the conventional legal approaches.
The post The conservation of biodiversity: thinking afresh appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Clare Hanson,
on 3/3/2016
Amid failures in saving numerous wildlife species worldwide, there is an encouraging success—decades of panda habitat degradation have been transformed into a remarkable recovery. The success is taking place in Wolong Nature Reserve of China—home to endangered giant pandas and more than 5,000 residents who share a 200,000-ha mountainous area. It is also occurring in many of the other 66 nature reserves and non-reserve areas across southwestern China.
The post Pandas and people: understanding their complex relationships for successful conservation appeared first on OUPblog.
By: keilinh,
on 2/3/2016
Alto, allá arriba en los Andes brilla un bosque bordado de bromelias…
High up in the Andes blooms a brilliant forest embroidered with bromeliads . . .
Set to be released this spring, ¡Olinguito, de la A a la Z! / Olinguito, from A to Z! : Descubriendo el bosque nublado / Unveiling the Cloud Forest takes readers into the magical world of a cloud forest in the Andes of Ecuador. We discover the bounty of plants, animals, and other organisms that live there as we help a zoologist look for the elusive olinguito, the first new mammal species identified in the Americas since 1978. It has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, which called it “a breath of fresh air in the too-often-contrived world of bilingual books.”
We asked Lulu to take us behind the scenes of her exquisite art process to make the cloud forest come alive:
I spent an average of ten days working from eight to ten hours per day creating each spread.
The first thing I did was to transfer the sketch to the Arches watercolor paper. Then I decided which areas would be collaged printed patterns and which would be painted in flat acrylic colors.
I prepared the patterned backgrounds pressing leaves gathered in the cloud forest dipped in ink and stamped onto rice paper.
With an X-Acto knife I cut out the shapes of texturized paper and pasted them into the background. I used archival glue and micro tweezers to affix the collage elements in their precise positions.
Next I prepared all the shades of acrylics that I would need for the spread and stored them in small clear jars. Each section of a color required several thin coats to achieve the rich look I was looking for.
Once the spread was entirely painted I had fun selecting pressed ferns from the forest to affix to the art. This was a delicate process as some of the pressed leaves and ferns are paper thin.
The last thing was to create the letters for the spread. I wanted a layered look, recreating the natural layers of flora in the forest, so I drew the letters on vellum paper and cut out them out. I taped the letters onto a vellum square and with careful precision affixed the letter in the spot it was intended to be.
Check out the final spread!
Lulu Delacre has worked with LEE & LOW BOOKS on several award-winning titles, including the Pura Belpré award-winning titles The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos and Arrorró, mi niño: Latino Lullabies and Gentle Games; How Far Do You Love Me? (English and Spanish), and Jay and Ben. Delacre has been named a Maryland Woman in the Arts and served as a juror for the 2003 National Book Awards. A native of Puerto Rico, Delacre lives with her husband in Silver Spring, Maryland. For more information about Lulu Delacre visit luludelacre.com.
You can purchase a copy of ¡Olinguito, de la A a la Z! / Olinguito, from A to Z! : Descubriendo el bosque nublado / Unveiling the Cloud Forest on our website here.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 1/29/2016
The soils surrounding the village where I live in the north west of England have abundant fertility. They mostly formed in well-drained, clay-rich debris left behind by glaciers that retreated from the area some ten thousand years ago, and they now support lush, productive pasture, semi-natural grassland and woodland. Although the pastures are managed more intensively than they were in the past, most of them are well drained, and receive regular dressings of manure along with moderate fertiliser, and are regularly limed, which keeps the land productive and the soil in good health.
The post Why soil matters more than we realise appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 2/14/2015
There is universal acknowledgment of the fact that India needs to come back on the path of high economic growth quickly. Although GDP grew at an unprecedented annual average rate of growth of almost 7.7% during the past decade (the highest for any democracy in the world), the last two years have been disappointing. High economic growth rates fuelled by high rates of investment are essential because they generate huge revenues for the government, which can then be utilised for social welfare and infrastructure expansion programmes. Of course, it goes without saying that rapid growth alone is not enough. It must be of a nature that creates increasing productive employment opportunities and it must be inclusive as well so that more and more sections of society benefit visibly and tangibly from it.
There is a yet another dimension to economic growth, in addition to its being rapid and inclusive. And this is that economic growth has to be ecologically sustainable as well. India simply cannot afford the “grow now, pay later” model that has been adopted by most other countries, including China and Brazil. This is for at least four pressing reasons.
First, no country is going to add another 40-50 crore to its current population of about 124 crore by the middle of this century as India is destined to do. (By contrast, China will add just about 2.5 crore over the same period to its current population of about 150 crore.) We cannot compromise the prospects for our coming generations by our impatience and greed today.
Second, there is no country that faces the type of multiple vulnerabilities to climate change, both current and future as India does. This is because of its dependence on the monsoon, its very large population living in coastal areas who are vulnerable to increase in mean sea levels, its reliance on the health of the Himalayan glaciers for water security, and its preponderance of extractable natural resources like coal and iron ore in dense forest areas (more extraction means more deforestation that aggravates climate change).
Third, environment is increasingly becoming a public health concern. From unprecedented industrial and vehicular pollution to the dumping of chemical waste and municipal sewage in rivers and water-bodies, the build up to a public health catastrophe is already visible. People are already suffering in a variety of ways and environmental deterioration has emerged as a major cause of illness.
Fourth, most of what is called environmentalism in India is not middle class “lifestyle environmentalism” but actually “livelihood environmentalism” linked to daily issues of land productivity, water availability, access to non-timber forest produce, protection of water-bodies, protection of grazing lands and pastures, preservation of sacred places, etc.
Environmental concerns are, therefore, not part of some foreign plot or conspiracy by some NGOs to keep India in a state of perpetual poverty. It is an imperative we ignore at our own peril. It is not just a matter of increasing the contribution of renewables to our energy supply. Much more important are investment and technology choices in industry, agriculture, energy, transport, construction, and other sectors of the economy. In April 2014, the Planning Commission’s expert on low carbon strategies for inclusive growth submitted its final report. In the debate on the future of the Planning Commission, this report vital to our future has unfortunately been ignored. The report concludes on the basis of its detailed sectoral analysis that low carbon inclusive growth is not just desirable but is also eminently feasible even though it will require additional investments.
The Modi government, like its predecessors, has stressed its resolve to integrate environmental concerns into the mainstream of the process of economic growth. This is admirable but we must recognise that at times there will be trade-offs between growth and environment, occasions when tough choices will necessarily have to be made — choices that may well involve saying “no”. It is when you work the integration in practice, that you confront contradictions, complexities, and conflicts that cannot be brushed aside. They have to be recognised and managed sensitively as part of the democratic process.
The debate is really not one of environment versus development but really be one of adhering to rules, regulations, and laws versus taking the rules, regulations ,and laws for granted? When public hearings means having hearings without the public and having the public without hearings, it is not a environment versus development issue at all. When an alumina refinery starts construction to expand its capacity from one million tons per year to six million tons per year without bothering to seek any environmental clearance as mandated by law, it is not a “environment versus development” question, but simply one of whether laws enacted by Parliament will be respected or not. When closure notices are issued to distilleries or paper mills or sugar factories illegally discharging toxic wastes into India’s most holy Ganga river, it is not a question of “environment versus development” but again one of whether standards mandated by law are to be enforced effectively or not. When a power plant wants to draw water from a protected area or when a coal mine wants to undertake mining in the buffer zone of a tiger sanctuary, both in contravention of existing laws, it is not a “environment versus development” question but simply one of whether laws will be adhered to or not.
By all means we must make laws pragmatic. By all means we must have market-friendly means of implementing regulations. By all means, we must accelerate the rate of investment in labour-intensive manufacturing especially. But mockery should not be made of regulations and laws. Indian civilisation has always shown the highest respect for biodiversity. Therefore, it should not be difficult for us to become world leaders in green growth. This is an area of strategic leadership where India can show the way to the world. Both the champions of “growth at all costs” and the crusaders for ecological causes must work together to enable India to attain this position.
Headline image credit: Between Sissu and Keylong, Manali-Leh Highway, Himachal Pradesh, Indian Himalayas. Photo by Henrik Johansson. CC BY-NC 2.0 via henrikj Flickr.
The post Why green growth? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alex Guyver,
on 12/13/2014
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 1844.
The concept of looking at nature through multiple lenses to see different things is not new and has been long recognized. As always, the devil is in the details. Recent developments in analytical tools and the embracement of an integrative metapopulation concept and the newly emergent field of functional biogeography, are allowing exciting new insights to be made by population ecologists that have direct bearing on our understanding of the effects of environmental change on biodiversity patterns.
The metapopulation concept posits that isolated populations of organisms are connected through dynamics of dispersal and extinction. Across a landscape, areas of suitable habitat occur, which at one point in time may or may not host a viable population of a particular species. I study this concept with terrestrial plants, and have asked what environmental conditions determine suitable habitat for metapopulations.
Much of the foundational work in this topic was conducted on butterfly populations in meadows across otherwise forested habitat. Regardless of study organism, embracement of this concept has been enough to make population ecologists realize that studying single populations may give only a limited view on generalities of ecology and evolution. Indeed, taking this concept on board, has led population ecologists to want to predict in which areas of suitable habitat across the landscape a new population may establish.
“There’s no getting away from field work!”
There are obvious conservation and management implications that result from being able to predict the geographical distribution of a species, whether an invasive exotic spreading across the globe, or an endangered organism. Unfortunately, just knowing where a species or a group of species may occur across the landscape is not enough. Individuals in some populations may have low fitness and their populations may be barely hanging on. For some species such as potential island colonizers, it has been proposed that limited ability to colonize vacant habitat patches may be due to the occurrence of closely related species occupying a similar niche.
Important ‘missing pieces’ from a full understanding of the metapopulation puzzle have been through inclusion of population growth rate estimates and incorporation of species evolutionary relationships (i.e., their phylogenic ancestry). Population ecologists have been toiling away making fitness estimates of their species of interest in the field. Systematists, on the other hand, have been grinding it out in the lab to generate the molecular data necessary to construct phylogenetic trees to help classify their species.
Community ecologists studying multispecies assemblages, as a third-dimensional angle to this question, have been working with geographers to develop species distribution models. It is only recently that the analytical tools have emerged that allow these groups of scientists to collaborate and address questions of common interest about metapopulations.For example, Cory Merow and colleagues have recently shown how Bayesian models can be used to propagate uncertainty estimates in the application of integral projection models (IPMs) to forecast growth rates as part of predictive demographic distribution models (transition matrix models could also be used). In other words, species geographic distribution predictions can be improved by accounting for population-level fitness estimates.
In another study, Oluwatobi Oke and colleagues have shown how phylogenetic relationships among 66 co-occurring species in populations across a metapopulation structured landscape of Canadian barrens can improve understanding of species distribution patterns. The basis for Oke et al.’s phylogenetic patterns among their species was the large angiosperm supertree based upon nucleotide sequence data of three genes from over 500 species.
The basis for all of the work described above are precise and accurate estimates of individual fitness and population growth rates. There’s no getting away from field work! Methods for carrying out the field work component of these studies, to allow the use of modern statistical methods including Bayesian analysis, IPMs, and transition matrix models, have to be planned and carried out with care. We have come a long way in the last decade in enabling population studies to scale up to address fundamental questions at higher levels of the ecological hierarchy.
The field of population demography is moving fast. For example, the recent launch of the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database, with accurate demographic information for over 500 plant species in their natural settings worldwide, will make addressing these scale-related types of comparative evolutionary and ecological questions even more tractable in the future.
The post Population ecologists scale up appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kirsty,
on 3/20/2014
Urban gardens are increasingly recognised for their potential to maintain or even enhance biodiversity. In particular the presence of large densities and varieties of flowering plants is thought to support a number of pollinating insects whose range and abundance has declined as a consequence of agricultural intensification and habitat loss. However, many of our garden plants are not native to Britain or even Europe, and the value of non-native flowers to local pollinators is widely disputed.
We tested the hypothesis that bumblebees foraging in urban gardens preferentially visited plants species with which they share a common biogeography (i.e. the plants evolved in the same regions as the bees that visit them). We did this by conducting summer-long surveys of bumblebee visitation to flowers seen in front gardens along a typical Plymouth street, dividing plants into species that naturally co-occur with British bees (a range extending across Europe, north Africa, and northern Asia – collectively called the Palaearctic by biologists), those that co-occur with bumblebees in other regions such as southern Asia, and North and South America (Sympatric), and plants from regions (Southern Africa and Australasia) where bumblebees are not naturally found (Allopatric).
Rather than discriminating between Palaearctic-native and non-native garden plants when taken together, bees simply visited in proportion to flower availability. Indeed, of the six most commonly visited garden plants, only one Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea – 6% of all bee visits) was a British native and only three garden plants were of Palaearctic origin (including the most frequently visited species Campanula poscharskyana (20.6% of visits) which comes from the Balkans). The remaining ‘most visited’ garden plants were from North America (Ceanothus 11% of visits) and Asia (Deutzia Spp 7% of visits), while the second most visited plant, Hebe × francisciana (18% of visits) is a hybrid variety with parents from New Zealand (H. speciosa) and South America (H. elliptica).
However a slightly different pattern emerges when we consider the behaviour of individual bumblebee species. This is important because we know from work done in natural grassland ecosystems that different bumblebees vary greatly in their preference for native plant species. Some bumblebees visit almost any flower, while others seem to have strict preferences for certain plants. The latter group (‘dietary specialists’) include bees with long tongues that allow them to access the deep flowers of plants belonging to the pea and mint families that short-tongued bees cannot. One of these dietary specialists, the aptly named ‘garden bumblebee’ (Bombus hortorum), showed a strong preference for Palaearctic-origin garden plant species (78% of flower visits by this species); although we also saw this species feeding on the New Zealand-native, Cordyline australis. Even more interesting was the fact that our most common species the ‘buff-tailed bumblebee’ (B. terrestris) appeared to favour non-Palaearctic garden plants (70% of all visits) over garden plants with which it shares a common evolutionary heritage (i.e. Palaearctic plants). So it seems that any preference for plants from ‘home turf’ varies between different bumblebees; just like in natural grasslands, some bees are fussy about where they forage, and others not.
So what should gardeners do to encourage pollinators? Our results suggest that it is not simply a question of growing native species even if this is desirable for other reasons, but that any ‘showily-flowered’ plant is likely to offer some forage reward. There are caveats, however. Garden plants that have been subject to modification to produce ‘double’ flowers that replace or obscure the anthers and carpels that yield pollen and nectar (e.g. Petunias, Begonias, and Hybrid Tea roses) are known to offer little or no pollinator reward. A spring to autumn supply of flowers of different corolla lengths is important to provide both long- and short-tongued bumblebees with nectar. A reliable pollen supply is particularly important during nest founding through to the release of queen and male bees at the end of the nest cycle. Roses and poppies are obvious choices, but early season willows also offer pollen for nest-founding queens. Potentially most crucial of all however, are the pea family as they offer higher quality pollen vital for the success of the short-nest cycle, specialist bumblebees such as B. hortorum. It is also important that access to what gardeners refer to as ‘weeds’ is available. Where possible gardeners can set aside a small area to allow native brambles, vetches, dead nettles, and clovers to grow, but as long as some native weed species are available in nearby allotments, parks, or other green spaces, we suggest that a combination of commonly-grown garden plants will help support our urban bumblebees for future generations.
Dr Michael Hanley is Lecturer in Terrestrial Ecology at the University of Plymouth. He is co-author of the article ‘Going native? Flower use by bumblebees in English urban gardens’, which is published in the Annals of Botany.
Annals of Botany is an international plant science journal that publishes novel and substantial research papers in all areas of plant science, along with reviews and shorter Botanical Briefings about topical issues. Each issue also features a round-up of plant-based items from the world’s media – ‘Plant Cuttings’.
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Image credit: Bumblebee on apple tree. By Victorllee [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The post Bumblebees in English gardens appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 2/12/2012
Italian panel depicting Charles Darwin, created ca. 1890, on display at the Turin Museum of Human Anatomy. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Today is Darwin’s birthday. It’s doubtful that any scientist would deny Darwin’s importance, that his work provides the field of biology with its core structure, by providing a beautiful, powerful mechanism to explain the diversity of form and function that we see all around us in the living world. But being of importance to one’s field is only one way we judge a scientist’s contributions. There is also the matter of how their work has changed lives all over the world, even of those who don’t know or necessarily care about their accomplishments. What has Darwin done for his fellow human beings? Why should they care about what he showed us, or want to learn what he had to teach?
Understanding evolution is challenging, for many reasons. We often point to the religious questions raised by his work as the cause of these difficulties, but there are many more. No creature decides to change their DNA, nor can a species foresee what they should become to survive, but it sure seems like they do. Evolution provides such elegant solutions to incredibly complex problems, it’s hard to see them as the product of random variation and selection. Even for people who lack religious convictions that make evolution discomforting, it’s hard to grasp the mechanisms of evolution. This difficulty arises out of developmental constraints that lead us to look for centralized, intentional agents when we make causal attributions. It comes out of the challenges inherent in altering our conceptions of the world and replacing one belief system with another, and out of the emotional reaction we have to facing the reality that we are not special or superior to our biological cousins, nor are we in control of the fate of our species in generations to come.
If we’re going to ask people to expend the time and effort it requires to wrap their heads around a idea like biological evolution, it seems as though there ought to be a really big payoff for all that work. So, what does learning about evolution get us?
We’ve asked this question to quite a few teachers, biologists, philosophers, and educational researchers along the course of several projects, the most extensive and recent being the one that led to the edited volume OUP will be putting out soon on teaching and learning about evolution. The reaction is almost always the same. First, there is the pause, as they blink, startled that anyone would be asking such a thing. Often they call upon evolution’s importance to science, and its beauty and elegance — who wouldn’t want to spend their time contemplating that? But if pushed back, and asked what practical value they could point to that would make the struggle of mastering these complex ideas worthwhile, they have a hard time coming up with an answer. The most common responses revolve around the (mis)use of antibiotics, and that people need to know that taking these drugs too often could cause real long-term harm. The second most popular argument is that people should understand the importance of biodiversity, how fragile species become when their gene pool dwindles and ecological balances are disrupted, and that being a part of nature — not above it — comes with responsibili
Miranda Ritts writes: The name of the book is Biodiversity of Coasts by Grey Pyers. This book is very 
educational. I think it is great that it talks about things that are going on in the world such as oil spills. This is a great book for research. It would be good for topics such as oil spills, biodiversity, and coasts. I enjoyed the pictures in this book because they gave a great example of what the book was talking about.
Diane writes: An excellent resource to have on hand, not only for biodiversity and biomes, but also to address issues of pollution, oil spills, etc. You need Biodiversity of Coasts immediately, but go ahead and get the entire series. Each title has unique information at a depth I haven’t seen focusing on biodiversity and relationships.
Have you ever held a book in your hand and tried to go online to find more information, but there was nothing on the web? You begin to wonder if you are losing your mind or not. I have been searching the Marshall Cavendish website, including their MC Benchmark imprint, but cannot find this new series BIODIVERSITY listed. The publisher did send me this set to review along with a slip of paper saying the publication date is August 15, 2010. Each title is under $20 and they contain information not found in other biome themed books. I hope Marshall Cavendish Benchmark folks fix this fast!
I’ll go ahead and give you ISBN information so you can order your books now:
After further checking, I saw that the series was first published in Australia in 2010 and FINALLY found information on the www.macmillanlibrary.com.au site with information that this is the International Year of Biodiversity as declared by the United Nations.
The publishers description states: Biodiversity describes the variety of living things in a particular place or ecosystem. It is essential to the survival of plants and animals but human activities have upset biodiversity and it is not under threat. The series examines the biodiversity of habitat types and ecosystems. It looks at threats and efforts to conserve biodiversity, and identifies biodiversity hotspots.
Take a look at the table of contents to see some of the diversity being studied:
Contents
I wish I had my scanner connected so I could show you a double-page spread and you could see just how much information is presented in these 32 pages. The information is spot-on for middle schoolers with small text chunks perfect for the reader who becomes easily terrified of too much
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By: Cassie,
on 8/17/2009
Are frogs a canary in a coal mine? We don’t actually know. What we do know is that amphibians have been disappearing for decades and all we have are theories of why. In their new book,
Extinction in Our Times: Global Amphibian Decline, James P. Collins and Martha L. Crump have gathered everything we know about disappearing frogs and used it as a lens to see clearly the larger stories: climate change, conservation of biodiversity, and a host of profoundly important ecological, evolutionary, and ethical issues.
The following post is an excerpt from Extinction in Our Times, explaining why we should care about the loss of biodiversity in general, and why we should worry about frogs specifically.
Why Should We Care about Loss of Biodiversity?
Conservation biologists, philosophers, environmental ethicists, and others offer several key reasons to conserve biodiversity. One argument is that organisms have direct economic value for humans. We use plants and animals for medicines, food, clothes, building materials, recreation, and other luxuries and necessities. But what if an organism that is of no use to us for food or hides is screened for useful medicinal compounds and found to have none? Do we sanction its extermination? Why must a plant or animal be of direct economic benefit to humans to have worth? Economic value alone is not the only reason to preserve biodiversity.
Another reason often given…to conserve biodiversity is that organisms, as components of ecosystems, provide services, and their interactions with other organisms contribute to the overall healthy functioning of ecosystems… On a practical level, biologists want to know just how much the loss of a few species will reduce the quality of services within a specific ecosystem. Two schools of thought prevail.
One idea, called the “rivet hypothesis,” is that every species contributes to ecosystem integrity. The analogy is that biological species are like rivets in an aircraft. Only a limited number of rivets can be removed from an aircraft before it falls apart. Similarly, as species are lost, at some point ecosystem function becomes damaged.
The alternative view, called the “redundant species hypothesis,” suggests that high species richness is not necessary to ecosystem function. The argument is that as long as the biomass of primary producers, consumers, decomposers, and other trophic levels is maintained, ecosystems can function perfectly well with fewer species… Some ecologists suggest that even if all the organisms now considered to be threatened with extinction did indeed go extinct, other plants and animals would take over their roles and ecosystems would continue to function with scarcely a hitch.
Going from theory and empirical data for specific ecosystems to generalizations about all ecosystems, however, is a huge leap. Scientists are a long way from agreeing on which species (if any particular ones) are crucial to maintain productive ecosystems…
Why Should We Care if Amphibians Decline?
People differ in their concern over amphibian declines… Peter Daszak, who at the time was at the Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia, and his colleagues proposed that global declines of amphibian populations are “perhaps one of the most pressing and enigmatic environmental problems of the late 20th century.” At the other extreme, an editor emeritus of a Tennessee newspaper wrote: “We read an article recently that indicated that frogs are becoming an endangered species. The information in the article indicated that scientists (interested in frogs) were unable to explain what has happened. Personally, we have not missed the frogs as we have little contact with them.”
If we could chat with that editor emeritus, how would we convince him that conservation of amphibian diversity is important? Why should we care if amphibians disappear?
…We should care if amphibians disappear because we use them for our own benefit. Every year we use huge quantities of frogs…in medical research and for teaching purposes. Isolation, identification, and characterization of novel chemical compounds that occur in the granular glands of anuran skin have led to the development of new drugs for human use. In 2001, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the average quantity of frog legs sold for human consumption to be 4716 metric tons annually from 1987 to 1997. We buy millions of amphibians each year for pets: poison dart frogs, pacman frogs, White’s tree frogs, and fire-bellied toads to name but a few.
Amphibians play a key role in energy flow and nutrient cycling, in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. They…serve as “conveyor belts” by transferring energy from invertebrates to predators higher up on the food chain. This transfer of energy is efficient because amphibians expend relatively little energy to maintain themselves. About 50 percent of the energy an amphibian gets from food is converted into new tissue. That, in turn, is transferred to the next level in the food chain when a predator eats the amphibian…
Amphibians provide the world a valuable service through their eating habits. Tadpoles eat tremendous quantities of algae. In doing so, they alter the dynamics of aquatic ecosystems and reduce the rate of natural eutrophication (over-enrichment of water with nutrients, resulting in excessive algal growth and oxygen depletion). Most adult amphibians eat insects and other arthropod prey. A population of 1000 cricket frogs (Acris crepitans, small tree frogs about 3 to 3.8 cm long) consumes an estimated 4.8 million small insects and other arthropods annually.
Thus, both because of what they eat and because they serve as food for fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, and other animals, amphibians play a central role in the food web…
A world without amphibians would be an aesthetically less interesting place. Frogs serve as good luck charms for people all over the world, because of their association with rain. Frogs symbolize fertility—some species produce more than 20,000 eggs at a time. They represent resurrection, because they seemingly appear out of nowhere after heavy rains. Frogs are “magic.” How else could they transform from aquatic, algae-eating swimmers into terrestrial, carnivorous jumpers? From tadpole form to frog form?
Amphibians, especially frogs and toads, provide inspiration for our artistic endeavors. Many cultures have folk tales about a kissed toad turning into a handsome prince. Who could forget Mr. Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, or Beatrix Potter’s Jeremy Fisher… Archeologists worldwide unearth ceramic vases and vessels with anuran designs, and frog and toad images are woven into tapestries and carved into wood and stone.
Finally, from an ethical standpoint, we are obliged to respect and protect amphibians, just as we should respect and protect all other organisms. It is easier for people to respect organisms considered to be “good” than the “bad” ones such as malaria-carrying mosquitoes. As just indicated, most cultures value amphibians.
Wow! I loved seeing the steps in Lulu’s illustrations. I’m definitely reading this book!