Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class globally, with habitat fragmentation causing welfare harms to individuals and population-level collapse across hundreds of species.
Amphibian welfare at individual and population levels is being destroyed by habitat fragmentation. Frogs and toads migrating to breeding ponds across roads face mass mortality events that kill thousands of individuals in single nights. Isolated populations lose genetic diversity and disease resistance. Chytrid fungus kills by disrupting skin function — a slow and physiologically distressing death. The welfare of individual amphibians caught in these population collapse dynamics is often overlooked in conservation discussions focused on species extinction risk, but the billions of individual animals dying from these threats have welfare significance alongside their conservation importance.