Some people may ask "Who cares about frogs?" Well, one of the reasons is that they are an important part of our ecology. They prey on insects and other pests, keeping them from overpopulating and ruining various habitats. They are also an important source of food to other animals such as birds, snakes, and other mammals. If you take them out of the food chain you could cause serious imbalance in the ecosystem and therefore cause the decline in other populations of other organisms. This circle of life is precious and fragile, and must be preserved. It has been said that frogs are a measure of the environment's health. Frogs are natural survivors. They lived through the last two extinction episodes including, the end of the dinosaur era. So something is terribly wrong for them to be dying off now. It is similar to the practice of keeping canaries in a mineshaft. If the shaf

ding a warning signal. Like a shock wave it will ripple across the world leaving a disturbance throughout its path. Who's to say that we might someday be next (Gibbons 1)?

t or world starts getting polluted then the canaries or frogs will start dying off, therefore sen!

One of the suspected causes of frog depletion is water contamination by toxic chemicals such as thallium, iron, and manganese. A Canadian survey of coal miners and coal generating stations showed that water samples contained very high concentrations of thallium and manganese. And from that study it was concluded that these chemicals are strong environmental pollutants. Many of the primary pollutant effects are wetland loss and degradation (National Water Research Institute). Between the mid-1970's and the mid-1980's, approximately 4.4 million acres of inland freshwater wetlands and about 71,000 acres of coastal wetlands were destroyed. You can just imagine how many species of frogs were destroyed within a decade (Dahl and Johnson). Take for example Kentucky and Ohio. They have lost more than 80 percent of their original wetlands, and California has lost nearly 99 percent of its original wetlands. That is just tragic, that a state has nearly lost all of their wetlands.!

It seems that the biggest problem yet, is the overpopulation of human beings. We are slowly destroying many habitats, along with the animals that

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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)