Human exploitation of amphibians: direct and indirect impacts

This chapter was written by Jensen and Camp. Direct impacts are use for food, pets, education and research, medicine, bait, and leather trade. Indirect impacts include the release of exotic amphibians in the wild by researchers, teachers and pet-owners; the effect of the decrease of amphibian in other animals, such as an increase the insects that they eat, and the decrease of the animals that eat them. Also the methods for catching amphibians can be very harmful, for example, pouring liquid bleach into streams to drive salamanders from under rocks. Most of the amphibians used for food are wild-caught. Possible solutions are to decrease amphibian consumption: in Germany they had a campaign “let the frogs keep their legs”; replace the use of amphibians used for dissections in schools by computer models, and educate amphibians pet owners and bait users not to liberate them into the wild (Please..don’t turn it loose is available at: http://www.parcplace.org/DontTurn.pdf)