“Is the loss of a unique life form on Earth big news? Not according to most media outlets. But how can the public care about global mass extinction if they aren’t even told about its victims? How can we care if we don’t grieve?” Jeremy Hance
The Guardian has an interesting piece on the wreck-less-ness of the news media on the recent extinction of the Rabb’s fringe limbed tree frog that was native to Panama. The extinction is the latest in a terrible pattern of Amphibian species going extinct over the past couple of decades.
Hance notes that scientists have warned us about the “sixth mass extinction” for many years, and how it will be catastrophic for all life on earth with the possibility of millions of extinctions of birds, plants, marine life, mammals and insects. It will be irreversible. Humans are driving this mass extinction and most of us don’t even know it.
His post notes that most of the media “chose to ignore a story that could not only inform readers of the loss of one distinct species, but also connect them to a global crisis that rarely makes its way on to the front page – or any page for that matter.” It’s a fair criticism of a media ignoring the facts and not reporting to their readers that human activity is driving us to the precipice of a place we will not ever want to face.
Jeremy Hance, a wildlife blogger for the Guardian and a journalist with Mongabay focusing on forests, indigenous people and climate change writes:
On 26 September 2016, the world very likely lost Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) to extinction. The species, only discovered by scientists in 2005, lived in Panama before it was wiped out in the wild by habitat destruction and the amphibian disease, chytridiomycosis. The last one was heard calling in the wild in 2007. But before this, a small number of Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog had been taken into zoological facilities for captive breeding. Unfortunately, the attempt failed. Toughie was the last to die.
Despite the fact that we can actually trace the extinction of Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog to an exact date, it occurred with very little media interest. Sure, the species’ demise was covered by many standard science media sites, such as Scientific American, National Geographic, and Mongabay.
But the list of what media outlets thought the story not interesting enough is perhaps more notable, including the BBC, the Sun, and CNN. Even this outlet, the Guardian, did not devote a full article to the extinction.
Many news sites simply reprinted the Associated Press’s story, which spilled 264 words on the extinction of Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (in contrast, the AP wrote three times as many words, 798, on Taylor Swift’s concert at Formula One). The New York Times at first only carried the AP article, though it later published a beautiful op-ed by one of the researchers.
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Still, Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog was truly amazing. Living in the canopies of Panama’s cloud forests, this species glided through the air via the webbing connecting it toes. Scientists also believe that it was the only frog species to feed its tadpoles by allowing them to nibble at the skin of adults.
If a frog such as this is not noteworthy, what does that mean for the reptiles, fungi, plants, insects or fish that vanish? What does that say about any species that doesn’t grip the public’s imagination – are they somehow lesser for not having evolved (or vice versa) to be easily loved by us?Amphibians are the canary in the coalmine for our current biodiversity crisis. Having been around for 370m years, amphibians make dinosaurs look babyish. But experts believe we may have lost more than 150 species in the last few decades alone, many of them to chytridiomycosis. On top of this amphibian plague, amphibians are being hard hit by deforestation, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, the illegal wildlife trade for pets and even consumption and yes, of course, climate change (which may be exacerbating the stunning death tolls of chytridiomycosis).