Amphibians have a long history of use in biomedical research, but have received little formal attention as laboratory animals. The need for amphibians and the increasing difficulty encountered in obtaining suitable animals collected from the wild have produced a demand for recommendations for the breeding, care, and management of these laboratory animals. With the exception of useful but limited chapters in books on other topics and of privately circulated handout sheets, this document is a first attempt to assemble the available, practical information on the breeding, care, and management of amphibians for the laboratory. Major emphasis is on the anurans (frogs and toads) used by investigators in North America, with some attention given to the urodeles (salamanders and newts).
In many respects, this effort is premature. Though the situation is somewhat better for urodeles, so recent is the attempt to maintain anurans in long-term laboratory culture that relatively little is known about the critical factors involved. Adequate objective criteria on which to base the evaluation of quality or uniformity are simply unavailable. Although there has been an increase in the knowledge of amphibian genetics recently, the control or reproductive cycles, the evaluation of nutritional regimens, the regulation of growth, and the management of disease in amphibians are only now under serious concerted investigation.
As a consequence of these deficiencies in our knowledge, this guide is heavily dependent on the lore that has developed among amphibian biologists. Therefore, the recommendations and guidelines suggested here should be considered as tentative. Specific procedures are subject to modification in accordance with individual situations, colony size, and personal preference.
A serious handicap to the development of adequate care of amphibians
is the relative inaccessibility to investigators of jargon-free,
yet adequate,
accounts of the "whole animal" biology of amphibians. While this document cannot contain more than brief reference to some of these matters, we hope it will provide essential information to those who are not experienced with amphibians. We also hope that it will lead those with greater experience to devise new procedures or discover new principles, whose adoption would greatly improve breeding, care, and management of amphibians for laboratory purposes.
This document should serve as a useful guide to all users of amphibians,
should lead to success in the normal maintenance of amphibian
colonies, and should stimulate efforts toward improving the quality
of utilization of these animals. In addition to guidelines for
animal care and quality, certain terminology is suggested. If
accepted in standard practice, this terminology should lead to
more reliable products from biomedical investigators using amphibians.