Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians
Mcconnell, Carolyn
Bookshelf REVIEWED BY CAROLYN MCCONNELL Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians EDITED BY MICHAEL J. LANNOO One could tell the story of evolution in four great steps: the...
...Sadly, Lannoo's book offers little of these...
...448 pages...
...division...
...The book will be useful to biologists wanting to design amphibian studies that can be carried out by volunteers, as it describes methods for training laypeople to track amphibians accurately...
...The failure is a scientific as much as a literary one...
...But it could be so much more, and its shortcomings seem somehow symbolic of modern science's difficulty in fathoming the roots of this issue...
...Frogs first evolved between 200 and 180 million years ago and have remained in the same general form for more than 75 million years (humans have been here less than 5 million years...
...Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1998...
...Around the planet—in agricultural areas, in ancient forests, high on mountains, in pristine preserves—amphibians are dying...
...With 68 authors contributing to this text, some of the articles, of course, are better than others...
...Article after article lists hazards facing amphibian populations: poisonous agricultural runoff, destruction of wetlands, introduction of alien species, acid rain, climate change, ozone depletion, and so on...
...It is unfortunate that this book does little to illuminate the issue for the intelligent layperson...
...It is the very magnitude of this problem that makes it so elusive of explanation...
...Amphibians are one of the most persistent and adaptive classes of animals, surviving wave after wave of extinctions, enduring as more glamorous creatures such as dinosaurs disappeared...
...But perhaps this book is the raw material out of which such unifying science will emerge...
...Therefore, each article fails to give an explanation...
...Perhaps this feeling was a dim premonition that the elimination of amphibians would represent the destruction of the conditions that made our own existence possible...
...Most of the prose is dull and technical, aimed at trained herpetologists...
...When I stepped outside the back door at night, I always watched out not to step on him, but out there in the dark, I would hear a soft plop and rustle, and it seemed instead that the toad was watching out for me...
...Yet no study seems able to isolate one sufficient cause...
...Not one species, but a host of them has been disappearing, at least since the 1970s...
...I had a tangible sense of loss...
...Spencer Cartwright's article on population trends in red-spotted newts and green frogs illuminates the life cycles of amphibians in a drastically human-altered world, while the case study of Sand Lake in Illinois will be instructive to activists seeking to preserve wetlands in urban and suburban areas...
...The explanation surely must be that it is all these factors together that have caused some world balance to tilt...
...This criticism may seem unfair, as the book is clearly intended neither as popular literature nor as a grand explanation of this great evolutionary shift...
...Adapted to life in water and on land, amphibians are exposed to the ravages of both worlds, since their thin skin and unshelled eggs make intimate contact with water, soil, and sunlight...
...Certainly, every book needn't appeal to every audience, but this crisis affects us all...
...Then we fixed the leaky pipe and the toad disappeared...
...In an effort to find explanations for this frightening trend, the World Conservation Union established the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force in 1990...
...Each step depends on the ones before it—a lesson we latecomers forget at our peril...
...The Status and Conservation of Midwest Amphibians, edited by Michael J. Lanoo, presents the work of that task force's midwestern U.S...
...But great crises deserve great writing— clarity, accessibility, and depth...
...They are considered an "indicator species": a species whose health is indicative of the health of the ecosystems they inhabit—in this case, the entire planet...
...great science would identify and unify the themes and trends in this research, transforming this jumble of disconnected studies into a resource for citizens and scientists alike...
...Bookshelf REVIEWED BY CAROLYN MCCONNELL Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians EDITED BY MICHAEL J. LANNOO One could tell the story of evolution in four great steps: the miraculous creation of life itself, the organization of that primordial ooze into multicelled creatures, the emergence of life from water onto land, and, strangest of all, the sudden appearance of human consciousness...
...It gathers lab reports from the various biologists studying midwestern amphibians, and includes data, methods, charts, graphs, and statistical analyses in great profusion...
...It will also perhaps be useful to the few dedicated activists persistent enough to find damning facts for use in environment impact statements and other bureaucratic dances...
...It was the amphibians who pioneered that third step onto land, about 350 million years ago...
...For most of my childhood, a toad lived under our house where a cracked pipe dripped...
Vol. 2 • June 1998 • No. 3
