Man-made mist recreates toads
natural habitat
October 2012. The Kihansi Spray Toad, Nectophrynoides asperginis, was
restricted to the smallest known range for any vertebrate species, with an
estimated historic wild population of 17,000 toads found within 2 hectares of
waterfall spray zone in the Kihansi Gorge of the Udzungwa Mountains in
south-central Tanzania. Only discovered by scientists in 1996, the
thumbnail-sized golden coloured toad was believed to be extirpated from its
small patch of habitat in 2004, and was officially declared Extinct in the Wild
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in October 2009.
University of Dar es Salaam professors, Dr. Charles Msuya and Dr. Kim Howell, one of the scientists to discover the toad in 1996, jointly wrote, "The Kihansi Spray Toad is unique because of its specialized habitat. It was endemic to Tanzania, in the ‘spray meadows' at the base of the Kihansi Falls that received more than 70 mm of ‘rain' per day in the form of spray from the falls prior to the construction of the Lower Kihansi Hydropower Project dam. Very few species of amphibians can survive in this habitat.
Gives birth to live young
The KST is also unusual because its life cycle does not have a free swimming tadpole stage, but rather, females give birth to tiny froglets."
The KST is also unusual because its life cycle does not have a free swimming tadpole stage, but rather, females give birth to tiny froglets."
Dam and chytrid fungus probably
extirpated wild population
The species' rapid decline followed hydroelectric dam construction upstream from its habitat that resulted in a nearly complete loss of the "spray meadow" habitat that the species depended on, and coincided with the emergence of the amphibian chytrid fungus, a disease that has been implicated in amphibian extinctions in several parts of the world.
The species' rapid decline followed hydroelectric dam construction upstream from its habitat that resulted in a nearly complete loss of the "spray meadow" habitat that the species depended on, and coincided with the emergence of the amphibian chytrid fungus, a disease that has been implicated in amphibian extinctions in several parts of the world.
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