Amphibians and the Environment

     
   
     This is a summary of the article I read, "Amphibians as Models for Studying Environmental Change" by William A. Hopkins.
     Amphibians have been used as models for ecological research for years. Studying amphibians can not only help us understand them in their habitats more but also how certain environmental changes affect us as humans. The numbers of amphibians are vast and they are in almost every type of environment in the world which can allow us to study the affects of environmental change all over the world.
      Amphibians provide good models for this research because of their trophic importance, environmental sensitivity, research tractability, and impending extinction. Amphibians occupy both aquatic and terrestrial habitats, therefore things thats negatively affect amphibians may also influence many types of ecosystems. Amphibians have traits that make them very sensitive to changes in the environment. There skin is very permeable which make them very suceptable to contaminants and disease. Since they are abundant in both aquatic and terrestrial, disruption of either habitat can greatly affect their life cycle. This is what makes them such a great model for looking at the affects of pollution.  Amphibians have many traits that make them very useful in experiments, the fact that they can be collected in large numbers from larvae to adults and can develop outside or in a laboratory setting is what makes them so useful for study. Over the last few decades the populations of amphibians have declined so significantly that some believe it is the biggest extinction since the dinosaurs. Many believe this has much to do with the environmental changes and many of these changes that also affect humans. The growing population of humans and the increasing need for natural resources is also a major factor in the declining numbers.
     Studying amphibians not only helps us to understand and perhaps help the declining numbers of them but can also help us understand how certain environmental contaminants can change our lives as humans.
http://dels-old.nas.edu/ilar_n/ilarjournal/48_3/pdfs/4803Hopkins.pdf