Frogs in full spring

A circle with a dot in the middle could represent…

…a solar system? Something smaller perhaps: an atom? Too small. A cell and nucleus? Let’s go for something a little bigger – and something that I saw a lot of today on the second day of Spring in Belgium: a single frog egg.

Amphibians have been around for over 300 million years – three times longer than mammals. They were the second class of animals to colonise land, after insects. They have stood the test of time – until now. The current extinction rate of amphibians could be over 200 times the background extinction rate. They are fragile and important.