by Janet A. Ginsburg

So much for Linnaeus. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), frogs (amphibians), alligators (reptiles) and turtles (also reptiles) are actually fish.* At least they are

if you intend to eat them.

I stumbled onto this reclassification-by-decree a couple of years ago while working on a story about frogs in live animal markets.

Kermit wasn't kidding -- it really isn’t easy being green. Global warming has wrecked frog habitat. Pollution clogs their pores. A parasite makes them grow too many legs, or not enough legs, or legs in places where you least expect them. And now a fungus called chytrid is killing them off by the millions.

I saw thousands of frogs in bags, buckets and cages in San Francisco’s Chinatown when I toured the market with a retired Fish & Game warden. Occasionally one would make a break for it, not that there was anywhere to go. Most of the frogs were simply too bruised and dazed to do much of anything.

Peter Daszak, executive director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, suspects the commercial frog trade has helped speed the spread of the deadly chytrid fungas around the world. A few years ago, Daszak, who coined the phrase “pathogen pollution” to describe links between human trade and travel and disease emergence, documented the first modern case of a species extinction due to illness: The last of the Partula turgidas, a land snail, were done in by a parasite called Steinhausia in the mid- 1990s.

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So where is the FDA in all this? Why aren’t they out there protecting their amphibious fish? It turns out they don’t actually have the manpower to go to docks and airports and physically check shipments. It’s mostly a paperwork thing with them. Besides, I was told, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is in charge of animal health. Well yes. And no. Even though bullfrogs are farmed and thus, technically, farm animals, the USDA doesn’t quite see it that way. Frogs don’t have hooves. They don’t have feathers. They don’t moo, or cluck, or oink. They don't pose a health threat to "real" farm animals. And they’re fish fergoshsakes, so that’s FDA’s bailiwick. Or maybe it’s for the US Fish & Wildlife Service, since the frogs are wild, sort of. But USFWS monitors endangered and invasive species, and North American bullfrogs are neither. Animal health? Isn't that the USDA's turf? Or the CDC's? The CDC only gets involved only when an animal disease threatens to infect people, not other animals. Have you tried the FDA?

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One day a frog whose species has gone extinct won’t be around to eat a mosquito, whose species is doing just fine (a warm planet is a bug's dream). The mosquito, loaded with some sort of nasty virus (West Nile, Yellow Fever, dengue, chikungunya, malaria) will bite a person. Perhaps a bureaucrat. Perhaps someone who long ago and far away could have done something to protect the frog that’s no longer there to eat the mosquito that carries the germs. The circle of life has a dark side,too. Ribbet, ribbet.

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* Part 123 – Fish and Fishery Products, Sub-Part A: General Provisions: 123.3, part d: Fish means fresh or saltwater finfish, crustaceans, other forms of aquatic life (including, but not limited to, alligator, frog, aquatic turtle, sea cucumber, sea urchin, and the roe of such animals) other than birds and mammals, and all mollusks, where such animal life is intended for human consumption.

Basically anything without fur or feathers could be a fish. “We’d go to the airport and find boxes of turtles marked, 'Fish,' so they wouldn’t have to be inspected,” the retired warden told me. “We’d pop open the crates: ‘Oh look at these! Four-legged fish!'"

** A few species are thriving, though generally not in areas where they’re wanted. The African Clawed frog,

a sub-Saharan native originally brought into the U.S. for research, hopped out of the lab one day and now threatens waterways, mostly in California, including the Lily Pond in Golden Gate Park. Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Australia, another African import, the Cane toad, that was brought in to control beetles

70 years ago, has pretty much taken over Down Under.