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OUR WORK

Australia is a world leader in species extinction and declines, largely due to invasive species.

Our Work  |  Ending extinction | Photo by Lindy Lumsden

 

Extinct: Southern gastric brooding frog

In the mountains of southern Queensland in 1971, biologist David Liem discovered a frog like none ever seen before. It didn’t merely live near water, but was truly aquatic, staying below for hours on end. It reared EXTINCT Primary Cause its young in an amazing way: the mother swallowed her 1980s INVASIVE SPECIES fertilised eggs, and the tadpoles lived in her stomach, to emerge as tiny frogs from her mouth.

The southern gastric brooding frog became world famous and was subject to detailed research, but that had to end when the frog disappeared from streams in the Blackall and Conondale Ranges in the 1970s. Before its disappearance, biologist Glen Ingram studied a wild population at his field site. In 1976 he recorded 59 frogs, 35 the next year, 24 the next, then 2, then zero in 1980. A gastric brooding frog seen by someone else in 1981 became the last one ever seen in the wild.

The extinction is blamed on chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), a pathogen that somehow reached Australia from Asia and caused multiple frog extinctions.

In a submission to the recent senate inquiry into Australia’s extinction crisis, Doctors for the Environment highlighted the loss of this species as a missed opportunity to understand its potential medical benefits. The frogs transformed stomach muscle into a version of uterine muscle, using mediators that might have cured muscle diseases in humans, had they been identified.

The southern gastric brooding frog is the world’s prime example of extinction depriving humanity of a medical resource, although it was far more than that. Inset: Michelle McFarlane (© Museums Victoria)

The book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends upon Biodiversity (2010), which was sponsored by the United Nations and IUCN, also highlighted the loss of this frog and the foregone medical insights.

In 2005, an ambitious team of scientists attempted to undo extinction and revive this species. Project Lazarus entailed taking cell nuclei from a dead gastric-brooding frog stored in a freezer by a biologist in the 1970s. These were inserted into the de-nucleated eggs of a related frog. After hundreds of trials the first signs of progress came in 2013 – a donor cell divided into a ball of cells. But although DNA from the extinct frog would build and replicate cells, it would not keep this going in any of the native frogs tested. DNA from the donor frog was interfering. Even so, the world was impressed, and the team won an award from Time magazine. Project Lazarus is on ice for now. Had it succeeded, the thylacine would have been up next.

Extinct

Australia has lost about 100 native plants and animals to extinction since colonisation, most of which were mainly due to invasive species. An estimated 27 of those extinctions occurred since the 1960s. 

Learn more about some of Australia’s lost animals:

Yallara (lesser bilby)

EXTINCT (1960s)

White-chested white-eye

EXTINCT (2000s)

Mountain mist frog

EXTINCT (1990s)

Sharp-snouted day frog

EXTINCT (1990s)

Desert bandicoot

EXTINCT (1970s)

Central hare-wallaby, kuluwarri

EXTINCT (1960s)

Southern day frog

EXTINCT (1970s)

Southern gastric brooding frog

EXTINCT (1980s)

Northern gastric brooding frog

EXTINCT (1980s)

Gravel-downs ctenotus

EXTINCT (1980s)

Dear Project Team,

[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

Kind regards,
[Your name]
[Your email address]
[Your postcode]


Dear Project Team,

[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.] 

I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.

The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.

The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.

This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.

Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.

Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.

Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.

I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.

Kind regards,
[Your name]
[Your email address]
[Your postcode]