Amphibians face an extinction crisis driven by chytrid fungal disease, habitat loss, and climate change — with individual welfare implications that are only beginning to be studied as conservation urgency focuses attention on these animals.
Amphibian welfare sits at the frontline of the biodiversity crisis, with millions of individual animals dying from chytrid disease in ways that may involve genuine suffering. The disease process — cardiac arrest from electrolyte imbalance — is not a quick death, and the scale of chytrid mortality events means that enormous numbers of individuals are affected simultaneously. The welfare of amphibians in the wild is inseparable from their conservation status: species whose populations have collapsed to a few individuals face inbreeding-related health problems, reduced habitat quality, and heightened predation risk. Amphibian conservation investment is simultaneously one of the most urgent conservation priorities and an overlooked welfare priority.