Frog whisperer

James Redmayne

Walking through a moonlit pond on Australia's east coast talking to frogs makes Michael Mahony feel like a kid again.The 70-year-old biology professor at the University of Newcastle has mastered imitating and understanding the language of frogs.

“Sometimes you forget to work because,you know,you just want to talk to the frogs for a while and it's sort of good fun,”said Mahony from a pond.He is thrilled every time they call back,but fears that frogs are increasingly at risk of going silent.Australia has about 240 frog species,but about 30 percent of them are threatened by climate change,water pollution,habitat loss and so on.Professor Mahony said frogs were the most threatened of all vertebrates(脊椎動物) around the world.

Over his career,Professor Mahony has described 15 new species of frogs.He has also seen some wiped out.“Probably the saddest part of my career is that as a young person,I discovered a frog and within two years of its being discovered that frog went extinct,”Professor Mahony said.“So very early in my career I became aware just how vulnerable (脆弱的) some of our frogs were.We need to be looking at their habitats and asking what is wrong.”

Beyond working to preserve amphibian (兩棲動物) habitats across Australia,Professor Mahony has helped to develop a method to help bring frogs back from the edge of extinction by“banking”genetic(基因的)material.“What we've done in the face of the problems of catastrophic loss of species is to establish the first genome(基 因 組) bank for Australian frogs,”he said.Professor Mahony has also contributed to a study by the World Wide Fund for Nature that found almost three billion Australian animals were killed or displaced by bushfires in 2019 and 2020,including 51 million frogs.

Professor Mahony's passion for conservation has also rubbed off on his students.Some students have also taken up his technique of calling and talking to frogs.