Last October, I wrote that the United States had just taken a big step toward its first amphibian extinctions.
This month, we are about to take a leap.
In October 2025’s Amphibians in our American future, I warned that budget cuts, the firing of field biologists, and the early dismantling of Endangered Species Act protections were pushing Frosted Flatwoods Salamanders and other US amphibians toward a line this country has never crossed — losing an amphibian species to extinction. We were close. We are now closer.
On September 14, 2026, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director circulated an internal memo to field offices that would rewrite the heart of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The rewrite would transform the ESA from a law that protects threatened wildlife into a free pass for those willing to push wildlife to extinction. The New York Times first reported the memo on September 16, and when I saw the headline, I got a pit in my stomach. The Center for Biological Diversity obtained and published it as well. The change the memo laid out is simple. It is also dastardly and devastating to threatened wildlife.
The ESA has always prohibited the “take” of listed wildlife. Congress defined take as harassing, harming, pursuing, hunting, shooting, wounding, killing, trapping, capturing, or collecting a protected animal — or attempting to do so. For fifty years, that definition of ‘take’ covered both intentional killing and the foreseeable, incidental killing that happens when people log a forest, drain a wetland, build a road, or plow a breeding pond.
The new memo says incidental killing no longer counts.
Under this new understanding, felling a tree you know has endangered birds nesting in it is not a ‘take’ of the birds in it unless the tree is cut ‘for the purpose of’ killing or capturing the birds’.
Apply that logic to amphibians and the law becomes a death sentence, accelerating the mechanisms that drove these animals to endangered status in the first place.
No one is walking through the Georgia coastal plain, trying to see how many Flatwoods Salamanders they can kill. No one is targeting Gopher Frogs or Dusky Gopher Frogs for sport. These animals disappear the way they have always disappeared: when habitat is lost, when isolated wetlands are filled, when fire is suppressed and the canopy closes, when timber is harvested across a breeding pond, when a road severs the upland burrows from the water, when a development permit treats a seasonal pool as empty land.
Those are all examples of incidental take. That is the only kind of take that has ever driven these species toward extinction. If this goes into effect, incidental take would be unrestricted, and the Endangered Species Act would no longer protect endangered amphibians.
The New York Times said it this way: The killing of endangered animals in the United States almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, that foreseeable harm triggered permits, mitigation, and some measure of accountability. The memo would end that system.
This latest attack on wildlife protections lands on top of a July 2026 rule that already rescinded the regulatory definition of “harm,” stripping habitat destruction of its legal consequence unless the agency can prove a direct, immediate, intentional strike on a particular animal. This is hard for the agency to prove, especially when many of the biologists who would be making the case for endangered species were fired in the DOGE cuts last year. The September memo goes further. It applies the same intentional-targeting test to the entire statutory definition of take.
For pond-breeding amphibians, that combination is lethal.
Frosted Flatwoods Salamanders (Frosties, Ambystoma cingulatum) have lost roughly 90 percent of their population since 2000. They survive on a handful of public-land wetlands that still burn on a natural cycle. Reticulated Flatwoods Salamanders (Ambystoma bishopi) are already listed as endangered. The Dusky Gopher Frog (Lithobates sevosus) was reduced to a single known breeding pond before recovery work began; it remains one of the rarest frogs in North America. Georgia’s rarest frog, the Gopher Frog (Lithobates capito) is hanging on in scattered Longleaf remnants across the Southeast and it is protected in many states throughout its range.
There are more than forty amphibians listed under the ESA in the United States. Almost none of them are killed on purpose. Remove incidental take from the law and you remove the only tool that ever required a developer, a timber company, or a highway project to look first to see what they might be harming or killing.
At the Amphibian Foundation, we have spent a decade filling in gaps the agencies couldn’t. In 2022, our lab produced the first Frosted Flatwoods Salamanders ever bred outside the wild. Since then, we have moved the lab to Agnes Scott College, and built a team with some of the finest zoos and agencies in the country, (Flatwoods Salamander Conservation Breeding Working Group, frosty.af) dedicated to saving this mysterious species, and increasing the number of baby salamanders we can release into managed habitat. If their protection in the wild is removed by this latest proposal, there won’t be a safe site available to release our baby Frosties into. This work depends on partners still employed in the field — the same biologists whose programs have been cut and whose remaining legal tools are now being rewritten out from under them.
I am not a lawyer. I am a biologist and conservationist who has spent almost thirty years with animals that most people never see. I know how they die. They die without anyone ever intending to kill them.
That is why this change is not a clarification. It is a permission slip to kill wildlife. Permission to cause further loss to our already dwindling amphibian populations.
Last October, I wrote that we had taken a step toward America’s first amphibian extinctions. The United States still has a chance to change course here. The Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973 by a Republican president because the country decided that extinction was not an acceptable cost of doing business. Redefining “take” so that only a cartoon villain with a net can break the law is not what that statute says, and it is definitely not the protection these animals need.
Speak up. Demand that incidental killing remain illegal. Demand that the biologists who still know these wetlands keep their jobs and their authority. Demand that Frosted Flatwoods Salamanders, Gopher Frogs, and every other listed amphibian not be written out of the law by a memo.
The amphibians have been warning us for decades, and extinction is forever.
