The Atelopus are disappearing rapidly in Latin America and we as frog-lovers would hate to see them disappear from their natural habitat. We've build this website to get more attention for these lovely beings and hope to get more people to recognise this problem. Let's hope this website is not the last place where you can see the Atelopus species in the future.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Atelopus crucíger Monitored by: Manuel Guerreiro (Venezuela). Date: Spring 2009 (May 30) Location: Henry Pittier (South of Ciudad de Cata) Population status: Critically Endangered although stable in numbers. Other info: This population was discovered less than a decade ago, after not having been seen since 1986
See also this link for more information about populations
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Atelopus spumarius 'Hoogmoedi' Monitored by: W. Cattersel (Belgium). Date: Spring 2009 Location: Brownsberg - Surinam Population status: healthy
See also this link for more information about populations
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction: The Atelopus species live in the American tropics. During the last 20 years the populations have declined over most of their distribution range. In the last 5 years several well studied populations that have gone extinct from nature, for example the golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) that we chose to use in our logo. There is a combination of reasons for the disappearing of these frogs but the main reasons are the loss of habitat, disease, pesticides and climate change. It has been told that of the 113 harlequin frog species of Central and South America, at least 30 have vanished in the last 20 years. Also 81 percent of the adequately studied species are in decline because of the above mentioned reasons. Besides all this bad news it should also be told that there are probably many more species of Atelopus that haven’t been discovered and/or described until this day.We want to try and expose a little bit more about these wonderful forest-dwelling neotropical toads, called harlequin frogs, to the world. By spreading more information about them we might hopefully be part in helping the world to be aware of this genus of species that is disappearing. Letting people know more about these animals might be a step in getting help for them to survive in the wild.We hope you’ll enjoy the photos and information on this website.
More Info
Who are we?
We are Marcus Bartelds from the Netherlands and Dennis Nilsson from Sweden. We both work at a ICT company and in our sparetime we try to visit south and central america as much as we can.
Knowledge
Half of the world’s amphibian species could vanish in our lifetime, resulting in the single largest mass extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
Thanks
To build this website we recieved some help and pictures. Special thanks go to R. Stuster and J. Yeager. We'd also like to thank; B. Vilette, J. v/d Meulen, G. Benaets, G. Bartelds, E. Twomey, C. Barrio, D. Mejia Vargas, J. Meere.
Copyrights
We respect copyrights and we expect you will do the same with our website. Please contact us if you want to use something. We are easy, we hope you too.... atelopus.info@gmail.com
