Thank you very much for writing the post. Albeit unsurprising, it’s somewhat disheartening to see this post being much less popular than the frog slaughter one. I have to say excluding tractability, I probably care about this issue than frog slaughter more.
Do you have a sense of the tractability (which includes making enough people care about this) of this issue, and what can be done to increase it?
Although the scale makes this seem like a gargantuan task I think that having a meaningful impact here is relatively easy. This experiment held in lab conditions used 0.0025 parts itraconazole for every liter of water. Another held in the field on tadpoles used tebuconazole at a concentration of 500 µg L^−1. Even without making habitats that concentrate frog populations and slightly reduce the cost, the price seems pretty negligible for basic disinfection. I haven’t found a figure for the salination experiments but the same goes there too. It would be great if someone with a better head on their shoulders than I ran the numbers on this, but I think with below ten volunteers and a small grant you could save 100,000+ frogs annually with good enough information on where they’re breeding and Bd hotspots. For antifungal treatments it seems that you can get away with maintenance and monitoring on a monthly basis or less, so the working hours required are trivial. Seems to me that its really a matter of organization. But with all this being said, I’m still not sure if this is the most effective approach and further research needs to be done to find a proper solution, but in the interest of reducing suffering all of this seems like it could be actioned tomorrow.
As for getting folks to care about the issue, I think the Shrimp Welfare Project is a good model to follow. People who already have sympathies to suffering-focused ethics just need to be given a sense of scale and the ease of treatment to be driven to action. Also, It’s possible that part of Bd’s rise is due to climate change which makes humanity’s culpability in all of this an open question and might inspire a certain type of environmental activist. Plus, nobody likes animal extinction, so a focus on the most endangered species of amphibian that chytrid infection threatens could be a good way to attract attention and funding.
Thank you very much for writing the post. Albeit unsurprising, it’s somewhat disheartening to see this post being much less popular than the frog slaughter one. I have to say excluding tractability, I probably care about this issue than frog slaughter more.
Do you have a sense of the tractability (which includes making enough people care about this) of this issue, and what can be done to increase it?
Although the scale makes this seem like a gargantuan task I think that having a meaningful impact here is relatively easy. This experiment held in lab conditions used 0.0025 parts itraconazole for every liter of water. Another held in the field on tadpoles used tebuconazole at a concentration of 500 µg L^−1. Even without making habitats that concentrate frog populations and slightly reduce the cost, the price seems pretty negligible for basic disinfection. I haven’t found a figure for the salination experiments but the same goes there too. It would be great if someone with a better head on their shoulders than I ran the numbers on this, but I think with below ten volunteers and a small grant you could save 100,000+ frogs annually with good enough information on where they’re breeding and Bd hotspots. For antifungal treatments it seems that you can get away with maintenance and monitoring on a monthly basis or less, so the working hours required are trivial. Seems to me that its really a matter of organization. But with all this being said, I’m still not sure if this is the most effective approach and further research needs to be done to find a proper solution, but in the interest of reducing suffering all of this seems like it could be actioned tomorrow.
As for getting folks to care about the issue, I think the Shrimp Welfare Project is a good model to follow. People who already have sympathies to suffering-focused ethics just need to be given a sense of scale and the ease of treatment to be driven to action. Also, It’s possible that part of Bd’s rise is due to climate change which makes humanity’s culpability in all of this an open question and might inspire a certain type of environmental activist. Plus, nobody likes animal extinction, so a focus on the most endangered species of amphibian that chytrid infection threatens could be a good way to attract attention and funding.