Saving Panamanian golden frogs

This video is about Panamanian golden frogs.

From the Baltimore Sun in the USA:

Maryland Zoo finds success in breeding endangered golden frogs

Panamanian amphibians victims of deadly fungus

By Frank D. Roylance, The Baltimore Sun

11:39 p.m. EDT, October 5, 2010

Working for a decade, almost entirely out of public view, staffers at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore have made the institution the nation’s largest breeder and shipper of the endangered Panamanian golden frog.

On Tuesday, 25 of the tiny, yellow-and-black amphibians were packed with wet paper towels in 13 pint-sized deli cups. The cups were set into a comfy nest of crumpled newspapers inside a Styrofoam box labeled “Live Amphibians!” The frogs were then driven to BWI-Marshall Airport for a 10-hour trip to the Fort Worth Zoo, in two hops on Delta Airlines jets.

There’s another shipment of 20 frogs flying out later this week to the Oakland Zoo in California. And 10 more shipments are planned as the zoo works to save a species that is now likely extinct in its native Panamanian cloud forests, a victim of a deadly fungus.

The Maryland Zoo’s work is part of a wider effort, coordinated by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, to propagate the frogs in captivity so that their descendants might one day be returned to the wild in Panama.

Although the La Loma tree frog, Hyloscirtus colymba, is notoriously difficult to care for in captivity, the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is the first to successfully breed this species: here.

Harlequin Frog Could Go Extinct in Panama: here.

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