California voters reject food labeling requirement_美文

California voters reject food labeling requirement

The brightly colored green frog was found at Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. It is one of more than three thousand amphibians to be added to the new species list in the past twenty-five years.

The AmphibiaWeb project was the idea of scientists at the University of California, in Berkeley, California. They launched the AmphibiaWeb project twelve years ago in an effort to bring attention to shrinking amphibian populations. The scientists found that amphibians are doing well in many parts of the world. They also learned that many amphibians have yet to be discovered.

David Wake is professor emeritus of integrative biology at UCB. He started the AmphibiaWeb project. When the project first began, there were only about five thousand recognized amphibian species. That number had increased to more than seven thousand twenty by August of this year.

Professor Wake says new amphibian species are being added to the scientific literature nearly every two and a half days. More than one hundred new amphibian species have been added to the database this year alone.

There are three categories of amphibians. Frogs and toads represent the largest group, with more than six thousand documented. Newts and salamanders are the next largest group, with more than six hundred known species. These creatures are often confused with lizards because they look a lot alike.

Caecilians represent the smallest group of amphibians. These legless, tailless amphibians look a lot like snakes or earthworms. AmphibiaWeb hopes to document every species of amphibian in the world.