How captive assurance colonies for threatened amphibians balance individual animal welfare with conservation imperatives.
Captive amphibian assurance colonies face the challenge of maintaining individual animal welfare in service of species-level conservation. For species where every surviving individual is critically important to the gene pool, welfare compromises that reduce health, reproductive success, or longevity have direct conservation consequences as well as being intrinsically wrong. The welfare of captive amphibians depends on precise environmental management — temperature, humidity, substrate, and water chemistry must be appropriate for each species — and on disease management that prevents captive populations from becoming reservoirs for the very pathogens threatening wild populations. Good welfare and good conservation are the same objective in this context.