review: amphibian declines

I'm finally getting into my copy of the humongous tome, Amphibian Declines: Conservation Status of United States Species, edited by Michael Lannoo (it's listed in my sidebar). What a fantastic book, well worth the $95 plus extra shipping charges.

It is broken into two parts: Conservation Essays and Species Accounts.  The essays and scholarly papers cover a wide range of topics, arranged by subject (introduction, declines, causes, conservation, surveys and monitoring, education). 

There were a number of essays I found particularly interesting, including those on the effects of UV radiation, pesticides, and parasites on amphibians; the importance of museum collections; exotic species; evaluations of various monitoring techniques; and creating habitat reserves for migratory salamanders (surely a vital but overlooked management tool).  A must-read for all conservationists concerned with endangered species legislation is "Houston Toads and Texas Politics," by Lauren Brown and Ann Mesrobian. It chronicles the roughly 35-year byzantine saga of the effort to protect Bufo houstonensis.  It is riveting, frustrating, and revealing...and much of the story took place under administrations much more favorable than the current one.

The introduction to the species accounts includes material such as various maps and graphs of species richness at different levels and tables of species grouped by various life-history characteristics.  The species accounts themselves are extremely in-depth looks at each of the nearly 300 amphibian species in the U.S., following a prescribed outline.  They were fascinating to read even for an ornithologist. The plethora of plethodontids, some found in only a few counties, was especially interesting to me. 

One of my only disappointments was that the preordained outline might have been a bit restrictive.  For instance, I have always thought one of the most intriguing natural history stories is that of the Amblystoma salamander complex in which hybrids of Jefferson Salamanders (A. jeffersonium) and Blue-spotted Salamanders (A. laterale) have resulted in two distinct all-female morphs, known as Silvery Salamander (A. platineum) and Tremblay's Salamander (A. tremblayi).  (There's much more to this story, and I'll post on it one day.)  This situation is touched upon in the A. jeffersonianum and A. laterale accounts, but is not explained until you get to the account on the "Unisexual members of the Amblystoma jeffersonianum complex" some 30 pages later. A little latitude allowing the authors a couple of a paragraphs of introduction or discussion, if necessary, would have allowed some clarifying facts to come out.

This is not an identification guide.  Physical descriptions are not provided, nor any hint of what various frog and toad calls might sound like, even though names like Bird-voiced Treefrog or Barking Frog beg attention. Although they have county-level maps and graphs, there are no photos (so I give you a picture I recently took of one of my favorite anurans, the Gray Treefrog, Hyla versicolor). The book winds up with a conclusion and a massive literature cited. This book is extremely well done, and I highly recommend it.