Talking to frogs? Sounds strange right! But that is exactly what has happened in Australia where a 70-year-old biology professor and conservationist, Michael Mahony at Australia’s University of Newcastle, has mastered imitating and understanding the shrills, croaks and whistles of frogs. Professor Mahony wades through a moonlit pond on Australia’s east coast in order to talk to frogs.

“Sometimes you forget to work because, you know, you just want to talk to the frogs for a while and it’s sort of good fun,” Mahony told Reuters from a pond in Cooranbong, New South Wales.

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Mahony is afraid of the diminishing numbers of the frogs in Australia. He said, “Australia has about 240 frog species, but around 30% of them are endangered due to – climate change, water pollution, habitat loss, the chytrid fungus, and in a variety of other ways. Across the globe, frogs are the most threatened of all vertebrates.”

“Probably the saddest part of my career is that as a young person, I discovered a frog and within two years of it being discovered that frog went extinct. So very early in my career I became aware just how vulnerable some of our frogs were. We need to be looking at our habitats and asking what is wrong,” Mahony said.

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It is important to note that apart from working to preserve amphibian habitats across Australia, Mahony has also extended help to develop a cryopreservation method. With the help of this method, frogs can be brought back from the edge of extinction by “banking” genetic material.

Keeping aside his love for frogs, Mahony had also made a significant amount of contribution, with other scientists, to a study conducted by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The study found that nearly three billion Australian animals were either killed or displaced by bushfires in 2019 and 2020. This also includes 51 million frogs.