The disappearing frogs story that hit the news today may be just the tip of the iceberg of global warming impacts on animals.
Newspapers across the country, including the front page of the Washington Post, reported on a new study linking the decline of frogs in Central and South America to a deadly fungus that is spreading faster because of warming temperatures.
The study, published in the journal Nature, is the first to directly blame climate change for killing off a species, in this case 65 types of amphibians.
But it’s not the first study to show that global warming could have dramatic effects on a variety of species.
Just this week a University of Montana professor told duck hunters in Arkansas that their sport could become extinct, too, because rising temperatures are drying up breeding grounds needed by ducks in North America, the Associated Press reported.
The alarm sounded by Montana biologist David Naugle echoed an article published in October by South Dakota researchers, warning that shrinking wetlands in central North America threatens the survival of up to 80 percent of the continent’s duck population.
As the Bangor Daily News in Maine said in a 12-page report on climate change today, vast changes may be in store for the animal world as we know it now.
“If climate change progresses as expected, birds such as the yellow-bellied flycatcher, Philadelphia vireo, evening grosbeak and Tennessee warbler could disappear from Maine altogether, instead breeding in cooler Canada,” the paper said.
