Blogs & Ecology

An increasing number of voices in the past two weeks are reminding people that though many nations are facing some serious financial problems at the moment, collectively we’re facing a problem with longer lasting and greater existential consequences than anything we have seen before. In short we are destroying our planet’s natural capital at rates which will create ecological insolvency on a scale with dire implications for humanity and many other species. Reenforcing this idea is the latest Living Planet Report by WWF.

The Holdridge’s toad is a small, black, deaf and mute toad that lived in Heredia’s Chompipe Mountain Range. After searching for the species with no luck, Barcelona’s Red List of Endangered Species, from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the small toad extinct from the globe.

Image source: Tony Eallonardo in Syracuse

Image from mape_s

Whoever said that Tokyo - the world's largest megalopolis, with over 35 million people living in the Greater Tokyo Area - didn't have any nature?

I know of at least one cheeky monkey that would beg to disagree.

Image courtesy of Pink Tentacle

This little fella, properly known as a Japanese macaque, has been making waves in national and international media with his impromptu appearance at Shibuya Station in Tokyo.

Shibuya is

If the rapidly depleting amphibian populations are any indication, we could be in for another mass extinction. That's the conclusion of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which finds that humans are worsening the impacts of climate change and disease on frogs and their fellow amphibians -- to the point where they are vanishing at an unprecedented, alarming speed.

While we do our best to avoid fear mongering on TreeHugger, we do believe that climate change is real and that humanity has to step up to the plate to fix it. If we don’t, echo scientists, life on this planet will change as we know it. With the emerging economy of China, the eastern superpower is now producing more greenhouse gases than America.

For every coal plant America shuts down, China opens 20 more. In light of some of our emine...

Image from Greenpeace

The more than 16,000 species currently listed by the IUCN as seriously endangered may be gone much sooner than we think. In a new study published in Nature, the University of Colorado's Brett Melbourne and UC Davis' Alan Hastings estimate that endangered species may become extinct 100 times faster than originally expected, blaming earlier predictions on erroneous, outdated models, reports The Guardian's Ian Sample.

It wouldn't be the first time that a previously well-established model has fallen by the wayside in light of stark new evidence (...

From Amphibian Ark

Amphibians are an important component of the global ecosystem, as indicators of environmental health and contributors to human health. They watched the dinosaurs come and go, but today almost half of them are themselves threatened with extinction. Addressing the amphibian extinction crisis represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity.

According to a new study published online in the journal Nature, the ocean may have played a critical role in precipitating many of the world's mass extinctions over the last 500 million years. Specifically, variations in sea level and sediments may have exerted a strong influence on extinction rates and thus molded the past and present composition of marine life, says Shanan Peters, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ...

photo by Dan Crosbie of Canadian Ice Service

It has been suspected for some time that global warming may cause widespread amphibian extinctions. In a study published in 2006 by J. Alan Pounds suggested that many harlequin frog species (Atelopus) across Central and South America have disappeared due to deadly infectious diseases spurred by changing water and air temperatures.