Looking at the activities of Amphibian Ark and their effords and the people involved(David Attenborough is the patron of the program for example) I don't think that they are looking for excuse to keep rare animals legally.I think their intentions are good but if that would be successful or not I can't really tell!I'm not sure even if humans should try to reverse something that comes natural as this disease!Yeah,I know that the fungus is spread all over the world by people transporting ill animals for the pet trade(nothing natural in this),but this again shows how messy things can get when humans interfere!If amphibians and reptiles were not as popular pets as they are,maybe the lethal dissease would've been still only in Africa..and that would be pretty natural I think!Now that the problem is a fact we should try and stop it,but all I'm saying is that we should've not let it happen in the first place! 

Hi Thomas,

I am sorry, but I do not know the Amphibian Ark.

I realise that global amphibian declines due to fungus and virus are very serious. Indeed further scientific research must be given high priority. In that connection I cannot say to what extent captive breeding programmes will be useful.

I appreciate that many active users of this forum do major efforts to prevent collection and smuggling of wild reptiles and amphibians. Indeed such illegal activities must be prevented. However, I believe that they rarely form any real threat to the survival of wild populations.

Instead, I see habitat destruction as a very serious cause for declining populations in Europe and throughout the world. For that purpose I think we should direct our efforts to ensure much better habitat protection. Especially in Europe we can do that by legal means, i.e. using the EU Natural Habitats Directive (or just called the Habitats Directive).

In general I am not really in favour of captive breeding programmes for conservation purposes. Only in very specific cases where habitats are fully intact In find such a solution relevant. But I will be open to other opinions!

Kind regards,
Henrik Bringsøe 

Personally, I have a big problem how it should work.
Here I will give one example on one Urodelan (sub)species, Neurergus strauchii barani, which definetively is "on the list" of endangered (sub)species.
Why?
If you know the location, you have to ask this question. The place is high up in the mountains, far away from the next settlement (a village, aprox. 5´000 inhabitants and aprox. 25 km away). Close to the location there is only one farm house.

and its one of my habitat pictures, you may try to find on Google Earth - impossible I think.
So why its on the list?
Because it only occurs in one mountain stream and some side creeks?

upper one: three individuals
second one: starting mating
And how Amphibian Ark will handle this?
LOCAL institutions (institutes and zoos) should keep and breed these species.
Here I see the biggest problem!
These institutions definetively have NO experience with salamanders and newts.
Even (private) people across Europe, keeping and breeding the species for 20 and more years now, still had suffered setbacks from time to time!
So I would like to call the Amphibian Ark program - when it should be handled as given now - the official largest individual killing program!

Mario 

Hi Mario,

Thanks for the information and your interesting photos!

In the meanwhile I have found the website http://www.amphibianark.org/ but I cannot see any specific project or plan to include this Neurergus taxon in a captive breeding programme. Do you know whether that is their plan? I would like to know more because (as I mentioned initially!) I basically do not know anything about it.

Moreover, I think Thomas or somebody else from the Amphibian Ark should answer the questions which have been raised in this thread.

Kind regards,
Henrik Bringsøe 

@ Mario: "you may try to find on Google Earth - impossible I think"

My knowledge of newts is small, of Neurergus none, nevertheless I think I can guess, with a little help from Google, in three attempts the location of the habitat picture.

First attempt:

close enough?
 

Marten,

you must have had some information on the distribution on the ssp., but the location, you point to, is completely wrong (but you are in the correct Vilayet)!

But I think, we should not show or name the excact location here!

Mario 

Hi Mario,
I agree, but it was only to show how easy it is can be to combine information from the internet to disclose location information. This case took me 5 minutes. In the article I've read, poaching was named as one of the main threats. So the lone fact of the publication of a new subspecies could also be the end of this subspecies unfortunately...

I'm sure anyone with wrong intentions and just a little knowledge can retrieve location information in most cases. Sometimes location is so obvious it is not worth to conceal it (for exampe the only population of Podarcis pityusensis canaretensis is on Illa Canaret, if you know of this subspecies, the location is not difficult to trace). Anyway, being cautious about locations is a good habit. 

I have just posted an answer but it didn't work (it took me too long) - so now I try a shorter version:

Thanks for your replies. On one hand we see that terraristic is already an important part of our culture and also lots of herp. organisations deal with this topic (e.g. DGHT) and support the ark. Also many scientific results came out from terraristic studies.
On the other hand it seems, that beside their nobel "ark" targets to survive species for the future it is a legal bypass of strict laws with maybe also a financial background. We don't know how the species list was established, but we believe that each species must be analysed in detail and if reasonable - species must be excluded (as Mario said for e.g. Neurergus s.b.).
We came to the result that we support our member in terms of providing a care sheet book for amphibians, where he summarizes his results of the last 25 years in keeping and breeding of amphibians, when he kept very rare amphibians (Urodela in particular). He is for sure one of the best on this sector and has reached fantastic egological research - but also breeding results for several up to now hardly known species (Neurergus, Mertensiella etc).
Our access to the topic remains critical.

p.s. somewhere we have the target Urodela list - when I find it I'll post it.