Dried or grilled - frog trade in West Africa

A new study on the frog market in West Africa under the direction of frog experts Dipl.-Biol. Meike Mohneke and PD Dr. Mark-Oliver Rödel from the Museum of Natural History Berlin rouses. Thousands of frogs are except in the sun to dry. Especially in the countries Burkina Faso, Benin and Nigeria the frog trade intervenes dangerously in the ecosystem. For the first time, the study demonstrates the scale of the exploitation of African frogs and the impact on the ecosystem. The authors call for greater attention to be paid to uncontrolled trade in order to prevent harmful consequences for the ecosystem and to suggest alternatives to the local population.

32 interviewed Nigerian frog collectors alone traded 2,7 million frogs a year. Meike Mohneke and Mark-Oliver Rödel examined the trade in frogs in Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria with the help of interviews with local collectors, traders and consumers. In northern Benin, for example, many fishermen have recently started trading in frogs.

A collector gets the equivalent of 20 dollars for a sack with a thousand dried frogs. Among other things, the authors followed a group of Nigerian frog collectors and found that 450 sacks of frogs were “harvested” within two months. In Burkina Faso, the animals are often caught by hand or with nets. In Benin, frog traps are deployed or the animals are blinded and killed at night with flashlights. Overexploitation of frogs is one of the reasons for their sharp decline worldwide.

The study by the two Berlin scientists aims to get an overview of the amount of frogs collected in West Africa, the market demand, the trade routes and the socio-economic value of the frog market, as well as to determine the influence on the ecosystem.

The tiger frog Hoplobatrachus occipitalis, whose tadpoles are predatory, is particularly in demand. The palm-sized adult animals are consumed in large quantities. As a result, there are fewer tadpoles, which in turn means fewer mosquito larvae could be eaten. This shows how the ecosystem could become unbalanced by overexploiting one of its components. "We are investigating details in northern Benin," says Mark-Oliver Rödel from the Museum of Natural History. “We put different types of tadpoles together in artificial ponds, wait a few weeks and see which algae appear, which and how many mosquitoes are there, what the water parameters look like and how the different frog species develop. Then we compare the data with those from the natural habitats. We would like to have doctors on our team so that we can investigate directly whether eating the frogs increases the rate of infection with malaria, for example.”

Despite observed declines in frogs, frog hunting has so far been uncontrolled. Since the profits from the frog trade are large, a rethink is not to be expected. Mohneke and Rödel therefore suggest establishing "frog farms" in West Africa in order to relieve natural frog populations, continue to guarantee the protein supply from frogs and create a source of income for the local population.

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www.traffic.org/bulletin/

Published in: Mohneke, M., AB Onadeko, M. Hirschfeld and M.-O. Rodel (2010). Fried and dried: amphibians in local and regional food markets in West Africa. Traffic Bulletin 22: 117-128.

Source: Berlin [ HU ]