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Amphibians in Czech zoological gardens — trends and implications for conservation

  • Michal Berec EMAIL logo , Monika Šindelářová and Mikhail F. Bagaturov
Published/Copyright: December 29, 2017
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Abstract

The alarming pace of loss of global biodiversity gets major attention worldwide, and amphibians are by far the most endangered group of vertebrates. IUCN estimates that 41% of amphibian species are threatened. The year 2008 was named as “The Year of the Frog” to raise both awareness and funding of mainly ex situ programs needed to mitigate the amphibian extinction crisis. Zoos and aquariums are expected to participate in ex situ conservation breeding programs of endangered species. Number of publications documents the increasing concern in amphibian captive breeding programs. In this paper, we reviewed the current effort of public zoological gardens in Czech Republic on amphibian keeping and breeding. Our results show that species collections reflect combination of the availability of species in the pet trade and the availability of surplus animals from other zoos, but not the needs of amphibian conservation.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jiří Doxanský, Romana Bujáčková, and Ilze Dunce for help in data collection, and Benjamin Tapley and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Part of the research was financially supported by the GAJU 081/2016/Z.

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Received: 2017-3-3
Accepted: 2017-9-26
Published Online: 2017-12-29
Published in Print: 2017-11-27

© 2017 Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences

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