Nature Unified & Inter-related

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ALL THE FROGS AND TOADS? (From a CAC General Reading April 3, 1990) QUESTION: There's been a number of articles in the newspapers and magazines in the last year talking about the mysterious decline of frogs, and I'd like to read this one from the Washington Post and ask Awareness what's going on here. The article is titled: "Mysterious Decline of Frogs has Scientists Worried." Populations of frogs, toads and salamanders appear to he declining mysteriously in many places around the world and scientists fear the dramatic disappearance of the amphibians may be a sign of widespread environmental degradation of some unknown kind. For several years, there have been rumors and scattered reports that frogs and toads appear to be far less common than they once were. More recently, many field biologists have begun documenting precipitous declines, sometimes measuring from 50 percent to 90 percent, and local extinctions in a variety of settings, from tropical forests to temperate mountain lakes. "We are very concerned," said David Wake of the University of California at Berkeley. "There seems to be something going on. Something we don't yet understand." The cause of the decline remains a mystery. Some researchers suspect acid rain. But others believe the vanishing populations could be caused by pesticides, viruses, hard winters or dry summers. In some locations, the frogs and other amphibians may have been wiped out by introduced competition such as fish. The animals may also be exploited for food or even by scientists themselves, who collect specimens for research. "Amphibians are disappearing and we're not sure why," said Roy McDiarmid, a herpetologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Museum of Natural History. "We have to ask whether this is a general indication of environmental degradation." To unravel the mystery of their disappearance, and to better document how extensive the decline is, the researchers have rushed to organize a special meeting early next year entitled "Declining Amphibian Populations: A Global Phenomenon." In the last few years, researchers have witnessed severe reductions and extinction throughout tropical Central and South America, Europe and North America. "Decline is very evident and very rapid in Europe," said Hansjurg Hotz of the University of Illinois at Urbana. Hotz said the decline is most dramatic in Central and Northern Europe. "What we're seeing is a decline of all native frogs

from British Columbia to Southern California to the Rocky Mountains in the east," said Andrew Blaustein of Oregon State University, who has watched numbers of the western spotted frog and the Cascades frog drop in Oregon. Could Awareness explain what is happening to the frogs and toads? COSMIC AWARENESS: This Awareness indicates that this is a combination of a variety of things, including runoffs from pesticides and herbicides, including also the depleting of the ozone layer which is more harmful to amphibians, being more sensitive to this excessive sunlight. Also, the increased encroachment into wetlands by developers. Also, there is certain destruction involved in the food chain. You must remember that frogs eat the insects which are being killed by pesticides, and when these pests have been destroyed there is less for the frogs to eat, and there is also seen some changes in the way water itself is treated. There are certain treatments toward water in some areas in which it may be channeled or banked in such a way that the mud banks are no longer suitable for frogs; such places as might appear near parks or golf courses, or manicured river edges then become uninhabitable as homes for these creatures. Also there are the planting of fish in waters which eat the tiny tadpoles. It is a number of things that are occurring. Even the activities in regard to the rain forests in Brazil and Central America are wiping out the habitat for many of these amphibians. This Awareness indicates the greater danger in losing these amphibians is that they are the natural predators of insects and as they disappear, the insect population will tend to have no predators other than birds and man with man's chemicals, and this can lead to the future further destruction of birds. This Awareness indicates that nature does have a certain kind of flux and balance that it can maintain if left alone, but when any one part is tampered with, all the rest is affected, and the greater the tampering, the greater the affect on the rest, and unless one understands the total mosaic or mobile -- for indeed nature is likened unto a mobile that is floating, and if you grab one part, it moves everything -- and unless you understand the total, it behooves entities to be cautious about grabbing one part to fix it, or make it better, because you might cause the crash of everything else. This Awareness indicates there is a book, "How Nature Works," which explains very clearly this concept of unified nature in which all things tend to work together and where the damage to one area creates a damage to all.

Source: Cosmic Awareness 1995 02 www.CosmicAwareness.org