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FeedProtection of Highly Endangered Mountain Yellow-legged Frog Delayed Again
By Ted Williams
NEWS RELEASE
>The Center for North American Herpetology
>Lawrence, Kansas
>
>28 June 2007
>
>
>Species Protection Waiting List Still Growing:
>Not a Single New Species Has Been Protected
>in More Than a Year
>
>San Francisco, California: In response to a
>lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity
>and Pacific Rivers Council, the U.S. Fish and
>Wildlife Service today published a “warranted
>but precluded" decision, agreeing with
>conservationists that the Mountain Yellow-legged
>Frog (Rana muscosa) deserves listing as an
>endangered species, but claiming listing is
>made impossible by “expeditious progress" on the
>listing of other species. This is the
>same decision the agency made more than four
>years ago, which the Ninth Circuit Court of
>Appeals determined it had failed to sufficiently support.
>
>"This decision is obviously a political and
>callous delaying tactic that is a recipe for
>extinction of the frog," said Jeff Miller,
>spokesperson for the Center for Biological
>Diversity.
>“Given that the Fish and Wildlife Service has
>not protected a single species in over a year,
>their claim that protection of the frog is
>precluded by other listings falls flat.”
>
>The last species protected by the Fish and
>Wildlife Service were 12 Hawaiian picture-wing
>flies listed in a single rule on May 9, 2006.
>Overall, the Bush administration has listed
>fewer species under the Endangered Species Act
>than any other administration since the
>law was enacted in 1973, to date only listing 58
>species compared to 512 under the
>Clinton administration and 234 under the first
>Bush administration. Since 2001, the
>number of species designated as “warranted but
>precluded” and included on the Fish and
>Wildlife Service's list of candidate species has
>grown from 252 to 279 species. At least 25
>species have gone extinct on this waiting list
>after being recognized as candidates for
>protection.
>
>“The Bush administration has closed the doors on
>the nation's endangered species," said
>Noah Greenwald, conservation biologist with the
>Center for Biological Diversity. “If the
>Mountain Yellow-legged Frog and literally
>hundreds of other species don't receive the
>effective protections of the Endangered Species
>Act, we will lose them forever.”
>
>Noting the frog survives in as little as 10
>percent of its original range in the Sierra
>Nevada,
>Deanna Spooner of the Pacific Rivers Council
>wondered: “How much more endangered
>does a species have to become before the Fish
>and Wildlife Service will take action? The
>intent of the Endangered Species Act is being
>subverted through administrative delay,
>sentencing the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog and
>other species in need of immediate
>protection to extinction through inaction.”
>
>Background
>
>The Mountain Yellow-legged Frog was historically
>the most abundant frog in the Sierra
>Nevada, ranging from southern Plumas County to
>southern Tulare County at elevations
>mostly above 6,000 feet. In 1959, David Wake, a
>herpetologist with the U.C. Berkeley
>Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, reported so many
>of the frogs near Tioga Pass that "[i]t
>was difficult to walk without stepping on them."
>Surveys 30 years later revealed the frogs
>were gone.
>
>The Service acknowledges that the frog has
>disappeared from the vast majority of known
>historical locations in the Sierra Nevada and
>that many of the largest populations have
>completely crashed in recent years; one of the
>largest remaining populations containing
>more than 2,000 adult frogs in 1996 had been
>reduced to only two frogs by 1999.
>Particularly disturbing are recent frog surveys
>in relatively pristine areas of the Sierra
>Nevada, in the John Muir Wilderness and Kings
>Canyon National Park, that revealed an
>alarming decline of more than 40 percent in the
>last five to seven years alone. At this rate
>of decline, scientists are predicting the frog
>will become completely extinct in the Sierra
>within decades.
>
>The species is thought to be declining primarily
>due to predation by nonnative trout,
>stocked in many high-elevation Sierra lakes by
>the California Department of Fish and
>Game, which prey upon tadpoles and juvenile
>frogs. Other causes include habitat
>degradation due to livestock grazing and the
>impacts of drought and environmental
>changes caused by global warming. Disease has
>ravaged many frog populations recently;
>factors such as pesticides, acid precipitation,
>and increased ultraviolet radiation as a result
>of ozone depletion likely render frogs much more
>susceptible to disease. Recent research
>has linked pesticides that drift from
>agricultural areas in the Central Valley and
>other
>airborne chemical pollutants to adverse impacts
>to native amphibians in the Sierra Nevada;
>pollutants can directly kill amphibians,
>interrupt breeding and feeding activity and
>larval
>development, and also act as environmental
>stressors, which render amphibians more
>susceptible to disease.
>
>The Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific
>Rivers Council submitted a formal petition to
>list the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog in February
>2000 and subsequently filed suit in May
>2001 to compel the service to respond to the
>listing petition. In December 2001 the
>Service was ordered by the Northern District
>Court to make a final listing determination for
>the species, resulting in the first “warranted
>but precluded” determination in January 2003.
>
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