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The Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog was unlike any other species on planet Earth. Inhabiting only the forests of Panama, the frog had enormously charismatic brown eyes, and feet so oversized they looked cartoonish. But what made the frog truly special was the way it looked after its tadpoles.
The Rabbs’ was the only known frog in the world where tadpoles would eat the literal flesh of their fathers’ back to survive their early days of life. That’s right: Dads could feed their offspring with their own flesh.
You can think of it as a clever invention, wrought by evolution. Nature is filled with these quirks of survival, which can take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, to evolve.
But in 2016, the very last known Rabbs’ tree frog died in an Atlanta Zoo. And with the death of the last one — a male, nicknamed Toughie — all the biological machinery that came with the frog was wiped off the face of the earth.
The loss of this tree frog was one tiny chapter in one of the most important environmental stories of the decade: The great biodiversity of Earth is diminishing so fast that we are now in an extinction crisis.
In the past decade, 467 species have been declared extinct (though they might have gone extinct in decades prior), according to the global authority on species conservation status, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. Others have been brought to the brink and still more are seeing serious declines in their population numbers.
At the same time, scientists gained “a much better idea of how many species we’re losing, where we are losing them, and we have a better idea of how well we’re protecting them,” says Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke.
A few years ago, a team of researchers in Europe wanted to figure out the answer to a simple question: How long would it take for evolution to replace the 300 mammal species that have gone extinct in the time humans have walked the earth? Their answer: 3 to 7 million years. We have already caused damage that may last longer than us. And that’s just the mammals.
In all, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimates many as 1 million species are now at risk of extinction if we don’t act to save them; that number includes 40 percent of all amphibian species, 33 percent of corals, and around 10 percent of insects.
But it’s not all depressing. We can still act. We know the causes of the crisis. And we know solutions that can work: namely, conservation.
“Every species on this planet had the right to be here,” Joseph Mendelson, the director of research at Zoo Atlanta, which housed Toughie, told me after his death, and with a great deal of sadness. “Our activities and our selfishness are taking them out.”
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