The fastest species extinction ever recorded has occurred.
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An environmental disaster on a Caribbean island has shown how quickly wildlife can be destroyed.
Dominica’s national dish was once prepared from the mountain frog. Every year, islanders and tourists ate thousands of mountain chicken frogs, fried with garlic and pepper.
Two decades later, the animal – one of the world’s largest frog species – has virtually disappeared from the Caribbean island. A series of environmental disasters have reduced the previously healthy and stable population of hundreds of thousands of animals to just 21 frogs, according to a recent study by scientists.
The astonishing rate of extinction of Leptodactylus fallax has stunned biologists, who believe it is one of the fastest extinctions of wildlife ever recorded, an ecological disaster that demonstrates how quickly wildlife can be damaged and destroyed.
“This is an amazing animal,” said Andrew Cunningham, head of wildlife epidemiology at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). “It can grow to about 20cm in length and weigh over a kilogram. Both males and females play an important role in raising the young, and it was one of Dominica’s top predators, eating insects, small mammals, snakes and other frogs.” Writes about this The Guardian.
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