In terms of amphibian conservation, and this is one of the major challenges in what we foresee is mass extinction episode where we’re embarked upon now. I’ve been involved from the very start, when it was noticed that populations of creatures that biologists were studying in the wild were disappearing around the world. And this was, this was corridor talk, this was pub talk at the first International Congress of Herpetologist over in England back in 1989. And it wasn’t part of the official program. No papers were given on the subject but I became concerned as I heard this corridor talk as did fortunately David Wake who’s at the University of California at Berkeley, and who was here at the University of Chicago for quite a while in this career. But David is a amphibian expert, especially on the salamander side of the equation. But he assembled an international panel at the University of California at Irvine to really assess whether there was a major problem at the beginning of 1990. And it was evident from the reports from Australia, from South America, Central America, elsewhere that indeed populations of amphibians were diminishing and sometimes completely disappearing, including such creatures as the golden toad in Costa Rica.
