HUMAN development is supposed to wreak havoc with biodiversity as it chews up natural habitats into ever smaller fragments. But frogs living in the central Amazon rainforest have not got the message. More species of frogs live in isolated wooded fragments than in the nearby pristine forest, ecologists have found.
Mandy Tocher of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and her colleagues at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus, Brazil, and Conservation International in Toronto studied frog populations in an area 70 kilometres north of Manaus between 1992 and 1994. They counted the numbers of species in 10 forest reserves - zones of primary forest that were left isolated after the surrounding forest land was razed for farming or ranching 7 to 10 years ago.
Four of the reserves covered only one hectare, four were 10 hectares in area, and two extended over some 100 hectares. ...
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