Rescue missions underway to save Haiti's species from mass extinctions

Haiti is on the brink of an era of mass extinctions similar to the time when dinosaurs and many other species suddenly disappeared from the Earth, reports a biologist at Penn State University, who is announcing today the establishment of a species-rescue program for Haiti's threatened frogs and other species, including captive-breeding and gene-preservation efforts. "During the next few decades, many Haitian species of plants and animals will become extinct because the forests where they live, which originally covered the entire country, are nearly gone," reports Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State and leader of the rescue missions in Haiti and other countries in the Caribbean. "The decline of frogs in particular, because they are especially vulnerable, is a biological early-warning signal of a dangerously deteriorating environment, just as a dying canary is an early-warning sign of dangerously deteriorating air in a coal mine," said Hedges, who...

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