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The Toronto Zoo chose leap day to raise awareness about an unprecedented crisis threatening amphibians around the world.

Cute gimmicks aside, zoo workers and local politicians gathered in front of frogs, toads and reporters today to speak about the global amphibian crisis and what they are trying to do about it.

This is an extinction crisis that is unprecedented in the history of the world, said Bill Peters, national director of the Canadian Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Frogs and their ilk have managed just fine for the past 360 million years, but now as many as half of the 6,000 known amphibian species on earth face dying out within the next few decades.

Pollution, loss of natural habitats and over-harvesting continue to be problems, but the big killer around the world is actually an infection called chytrid fungus.

That fungus attacks the skin of the frogs. It can no longer take in oxygen or water and they die, said Bob Johnson, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Toronto Zoo.

About 120 species have already gone extinct and many others are threatened around the world, largely due to the disease, which originated in South Africa about a decade ago.

The disease is especially difficult to deal with because it attacks the animals even when they live in natural conservation areas.

There are no safe places, Johnson said. We know we have our national parks and protected areas, but when we have a disease organism like a fungus that spreads throughout the planet, its certainly frightening, because the spaces we once thought were safe for all wildlife are no longer so.

The zoo declared 2008 the year of the frog to celebrate the opening of its amphibian breeding centre to the public.

The zoo launched a captive breeding program for Puerto Rican crested toads in 1986 and has since released 52,000 of the animals, once thought to be extinct, back into the wild.

Today the zoo opened up one of its breeding rooms so that visitors could watch the program in action through a glass window in the exhibition space.

The zoo will also open a frog rescue centre this summer that will increase the number of animals they will be able to quarantine.

Were holding them here until the issue of the fungus can be removed from the wild, if it ever can, and then the animals can hopefully go back, Johnson said. There is a worldwide effort of scientists trying to fix the problems in the wild and were holding the animals here in trust so that they can go back hopefully in the near future.

Donna Cansfield, the Ontario minister of natural resources, was there today to promote what the provincial government is doing to help species at risk.

She said the government is ironing out the details of endangered species legislations that will come into effect this June for 128 species at risk and almost another 200 that are threatened.