"The nonnative amphibians pose a threat, but efforts to ban them pit environmentalists against Asian Americans, who relish them."
"San Francisco -- Miles Young strode down a narrow passageway in a bustling Chinatown fish market, methodically scanning aquariums and plastic bins filled with hundreds of live frogs selling for $3.99 a pound.
They were imported from frog farms in Taiwan, the environmental activist and former game warden said.
The species is particularly susceptible to a skin fungus linked to vanishing amphibians around the world. And the conditions in which bullfrogs are raised, transported and sold are ideal breeding grounds for the fungus and its waterborne zoospores.
'It should be against the law to bring diseased nonnative animals into California,' he grumbled. 'But every time someone proposes a ban on bullfrogs, politics gets in the way and nothing gets done.'"
Louis Sahagun reports for the Los Angeles Times November 21, 2011.
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