[Animals] Amphibians are among the animals most threatened by climate change | Interview with Mauricio Ortega

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San Antonio de Pichincha is a town in Ecuador that boasts of being located exactly in the center of the world, through which the equatorial line that divides the Earth into the northern and southern hemispheres passes. It was precisely there that the herpetologist Mauricio Ortega spent a large part of his childhood. "At that time there were not many people living there, there was a lot of forest and, for example, you would find a lizard when lifting any stone."

All that environment, added to his childhood passion for National Geographic documentaries and series, led him to study Biology. Years later, in the internships and advanced classes of the career at the Central University of Ecuador, he was part of a student group where he began to work with dung beetles, but then he had the opportunity to be part of a project on amphibians and reptiles, “But nobody wanted to. I remember that there were many people who liked to work with insects, mammals, but nobody wanted to get into herpetology ”.

But Ortega did "enter" and since then he has not left that world. In addition, recently he was one of the 33 scientists who worked in the elaboration of the Red List of Amphibians of Ecuador and where he also assumed the coordination of this ambitious project that took about five years.

 

Link: https://elcomercio.pe/tecnologia/ecologia/los-anfibios-estan-entre-los-animales-mas-amenazados-por-el-cambio-climatico-entrevista-a-mauricio-ortega-noticia/