Eating to Extinction
(February 4th 2009) Frogs are more popular than one might expect. Not only do they make wonderful, decorative rainforest motifs for calendars and books, but they also turn up as edible titbits in many countries. In fact, warn scientists, these hopping amphibians now end up on dishes so often that they currently face a fair chance of vanishing from the Earth's surface forever. Melanie Estrella.
'A hungry man has no conscience', says a common proverb. How true!
Humans ate the dodo (
Raphus cucullatus) to extinction; they gorged themselves on all the Steller's seacows (
Hydrodamalis gigas); they consumed the American passenger pigeon (
Ectopistes migratorius) to eradication - to name but a few of their no longer existent prey. However, now they have set out to empty all the frogs from the jungles in order to banquet on their legs. Although frog's tiny legs do little to allay human hunger, these amphibians are at great risk of perishing from their culinary popularity.
Eating habits vary greatly throughout the world. While Europeans are rather conservative concerning their meat dishes, preferring pork, beef, lamb, or chicken, shopping lists in Asia are much more extensive and are by no means restricted to specially bred animals. Or protected ones. In Vietnam, foodies enjoy, amongst other animals, civet cats, pangolins (scaly ant eaters), and monitor lizards, none of which are legal foodstuffs. Compared to such menus, the consumption of an occasional frog leg in Europe, particularly in France, seems to be a rather harmless vice.
But scientists are warning that the demand for tasty amphibians is depleting their populations dramatically. “Eating frogs into extinction”, is the title of an article in the journal,
Conservation Biology, by Corey Bradshaw from the University of Adelaide, Ian Warkentin from Canada's Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Memorial University at Corner Brook, and David Bickford and Navjot Sodhi at the National University of Singapore (Conservation Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01165.x).
Bickford estimates that about 180 million to more than a billion frogs are harvested every year. "That's based on both sound data and an estimate of consumption for just Indonesia and China," he said. "My 180 million minimum is almost laughably conservative." The local European frog populations that initially supplied cuisines were over-harvested, like many fish species today, and hence have been replaced by Asian imports.
Athough the statistics for frogs as trade items are sparse, UN figures indicate that global trade has increased over the past 20 years. France, and - astonishingly - the USA, are the two top importing countries. But frogs' legs are also quite popular in Asia. The world's largest exporter of frogs is Indonesia, shipping more than 5000 tonnes of frog meat abroad each year, principally to France, Belgium and Luxemburg. Most of the frogs are skinned, butchered, and frozen before being sent, making it hard to identify exactly what kind of frogs are on the menu and the Endangered List, respectively.
Bickford and his co-authors are calling for stricter regulation and monitoring of the global frog market to avoid the extinction of any frog species. Already at least 30 percent of all living amphibian species are endangered, pressed by loss of habitats, harmful substances, acromycosis, climate change and increased UV radiation. Whether the implementation of more rigorous regulations will be effective is another matter though. There are already quite a lot of regulations for the protection of species. But the main problem is the control of compliance and the penalisation of those snatching animals out of the wilderness.
Humans cannot have all these species and eat them too. The Dodo Steller's seacow and the American passenger pigeon have already fallan prey to human appetite. Unfortunately, there are many gourmets who still consider spoiling their palates with rare and exotic tastes to be more important than taking responsibility for conserving the rich biological diversity of this planet
