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Golden toad saved from brink of extinction mongabay.com August 17, 2010
The species, which last year was declared extinct in the wild by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), was rehabilitated in captivity at the Bronx Zoo and the Toledo Zoo. Since 2004, when the toad was last seen in the wild, the captive population has climbed from a few hundred to nearly 7,000. For now, the toads—which unusually bear live young rather than laying eggs—reside in a new propagation center in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but plans are now in the works to eventually reintroduce the amphibian into its native habitat: the Kihansi Gorge in the Southern Udzungwa Mountains of South Central Tanzania, a region that possess the greatest biodiversity in all of Tanzania.
"On behalf of the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, we are very grateful to the Bronx Zoo and The Toledo Zoo for taking care of these precious toads for ten years,” said Anna Maembe on behalf of the Government of Tanzania. "We are very optimistic that they will acclimatize soon and be taken to their homeland in Kihansi Gorge in the near future." Damned by electricity demand
Facing almost certain extinction in the wild, the World Bank partnered with the Tanzanian government, the Toledo Zoo, and WCS's Bronx Zoo, to save the species through a captive breeding program. Now the captive population in U.S. institutions have a level where 100 toads can go back to Tanzania. "This is an important step that has been achieved through a lot of hard work," said Jane Kibbassa, Task Team Leader for the Lower Kihansi Environmental Management Project which has installed a new sprinklers system to replicate the toad's habitat. "The Bank has financed Tanzania's commitment to save the Kihansi spray toad for nearly a decade, and has been looking forward to a successful reintroduction, which will be a measure of the recovery of the ecosystem and the success of the Lower Kihansi Environmental Management Project."
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(11/04/2009) This year's IUCN Red List has updated its assessment of the Kihansi spray toad, moving the species from Critically Endangered to Extinct in the Wild. With that another amphibian species has been lost to a combination of habitat loss and the devastating amphibian disease, the chytrid fungus. The Kihansi spray toad Nectophrynoides asperginis, which still survives in a number of zoos in the United States, had lived on just two hectares along the Kihansi gorge in Tanzania. The toad was specially adapted to the spray region of the Kihansi waterfall, which kept its small environment at a constant temperature and humidity.
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