Category Archives: Amphibian habitat loss

06/20/10

Teach Your Children Well (about nature): Father's Day Thoughts

A couple of months ago, we received a lovely email from a reader named Marty who lives in in Eastern Pennsylvania (Lehigh County) one hour south of the Pocono Mountains.  Here’s part of the email:

What’s  the best thing I can do as a Dad to teach my children to preserve these treasures [frogs and salamanders] that are so dear to me. My grandfather taught me the love of wild places and I want to pass that on to them.

I wish more dads were thinking about how they could introduce nature to kids. My sons are in their twenties and still love learning about wildlife and animals. I think most of this love of nature came from their father. So I’m offering a few suggestions. But we’d like to open this up to readers of Frogs Are Green and get your ideas also. How did your father encourage your love of nature? What are you doing as a dad to instill a love of nature in your kids.

photo by Mary Jo Rhodes

Here are some ideas:

• take them on short hikes or walks into the woods, starting when they are very young. (Here is a list of state parks). Young children need no encouragement to love nature—everything around them is still magical and interesting (bugs, stones, flowers).  The key is to keep taking them on walks in the woods throughout their childhood, even when they start saying it’s boring (the preteen years). You might have to add other incentives during the rougher times (a trip to an ice cream store afterwards or some other treat).

• Your child might start to like one animal and that may become their animal. Encourage this by buying books about the animal, plush toys, trips to see the animal in the wild (whale watching trips, for example), or in zoos or aquariums.  You can adopt various wild animals for $25 or so, and this will give your child a personal connection to the animal (we adopted a whale when our sons were young).

• Plan family vacations around national parks rather than amusement parks. We’ve visited a number of national parks over the years. These are fun because the trails through them are easy and well worn, there’s a certain familiarity to them (the park rangers, the gift shops, etc), and the scenery is spectacular. You can buy a passport for your child and have it stamped in each national park you go to.

• Share you enthusiasm about nature, but don’t be too heavy handed about it. If kids feel you are always teaching them, they might get turned off. Instead, share your sense of wonder. Point out a cardinal (look at that red bird!), but don’t turn it into a lesson about birds.

• The National Wildlife Federation has ideas about enjoying nature with children, including setting up a tent in your backyard and sleeping outside. I did this a few times as a kid in my suburban backyard (without the tent), and loved it. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place far from cities, you can stargaze with your children, pointing out a few constellations.

• as far as our amphibians friends….the best places that we’ve found to see them are state parks. Unlike Marty, we live in an urban area and it’s tough to find amphibians in a region where all the land has been developed. But state parks and wildlife refuges that have been left untouched, with ponds and swamps, are great places to see them. Tell your kids to look out for frogs, toads, and salamanders. Kids are closer to the ground and have sharper eyes and will most likely see them before you do. You can also build a frog pond in your backyard.

Dads: Please send along your ideas as well for introducing children to nature! Happy Father’s Day!

04/29/10

Big Chill Helps Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog

One of the most endangered amphibians in North America—the mountain yellow-legged frog—might have some hope this spring due to the collaborative work of researchers at the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, along with the help of biologists at the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Courtesy of UC Berkeley, www.crcd.org

As reported in the Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California), researchers from the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, which has a captive breeding program for the frogs, discovered that three months hibernation in near-freezing water is what gets these frogs in the mood for love. In the wild, frogs hibernate in icy, high-elevation streams, not in 55-degree aquariums. To mimic these cool temperatures, they were placed in clear plastic shoe boxes called “Valentine’s Day retreats” and stored in the refrigerators.

When they were removed from the refrigerators in April, they displayed breeding behavior within a few days. According to the institute’s Research Coordinator Jeff Lemm, “It has been wildly successful, and as a result, we could reintroduce about 500 eggs into the San Jacinto Mountains.”*

Only 200 individual mountain yellow-legged frogs exist in the wild. Once common in Southern California’s mountain streams, the frog species is almost extinct due to fungal infections, pollution, habitat loss, and predatory trout introduced for fishing. Researchers hope to re-establish wild populations with the captive-bred frogs.

Kudos to students, researchers, and biologists who are helping to save the mountain yellow-legged frog from extinction!

Please see the video below to learn more about efforts to save the mountain yellow-legged frog. This frog species was also featured in the episode Yosemite in the recently rebroadcast PBS documentary The Thin Green Line, about the amphibian decline, which you can watch online.

*As reported on the University of California’s Natural Reserve System site.

04/7/10

Vernal Pools: Woodland Nurseries for Frogs and Salamanders

This past weekend, I went hiking with my family in Harriman State Park in New York. We’ve had a very wet spring—well, actually it sometimes seems as if we’ve been living in a rainforest. It’s possible that all this rain will means lots of frogs and toads this summer.

While hiking we found a swamp and listened to a wonderful chorus of spring peepers and (we think) Eastern American toads.

My son Jeremy listening to a chorus of spring peers, Surebridge Swamp, Harriman State Park, New York

My son Jeremy listening to a chorus of spring peepers, Surebridge Swamp, Harriman State Park, New York

We also saw lots of vernal pools, bodies of water that appear in the spring and last from two to three months before they dry up in the summer. Some types of amphibians, crustaceans, and other wildlife need these pools for breeding, hatching eggs, or as a nursery while they are young. Because they are temporary, vernal pools do not contain fish (which eat tadpoles and larvae).

When you hike by vernal pools, they don’t look like much. In fact, my sneakers got soaked as I tried to jump over one. Yet they are of critical importance to wildlife. I’ve noticed, however, a lot of comments on environmental blogs that read something like this, “Only treehuggers would want to save these mud puddles!” Yet wood frogs, some species of salamander, and fairy shrimp need these “mud puddles” in order to survive. Every year hundreds of acres of wetlands are lost (usually forever) to commercial or residential development. According to the Ohio Vernal Pool Partnership

These usually small, but very dynamic wetlands fill with water, blossom with life and host a cacophony of sounds and a plethora of life forms every spring, only to disappear into the forest floor every autumn…. A vernal pool is a place where a good naturalist can weave many fascinating stories about the amazing life forms, adaptations, and life histories of its inhabitants, and demonstrate it by a single swoop of a dip net! Vernal pool is a miniature, fascinatingly complex and fragile world, with all of its drama played out every year close to our homes, and yet most of us have never witnessed it. [Ohio Vernal Pool Partnership].

Salamanders and woodfrogs migrate from their wintering sites to vernal pools for breeding when the conditions are right, courtesy of The Vernal Pool Association
Salamanders and woodfrogs migrate from their wintering sites to vernal pools for breeding when the conditions are right, courtesy of The Vernal Pool Association

Here are some sites and articles I’ve found (you can also try putting “vernal pool” and the name of your state in google).

California

Pennsylvania

Maine

New Jersey

Massachusetts (The Vernal Pool Association)

Ohio

04/2/10

The Amphibian Avenger – Lucy Cooke

We’re proud to feature guest blogger, Lucy Cooke, The Amphibian Avenger, who tells us about herself, what her mission is, and how we can all help.

amphibian-avenger-Lucy

I love frogs. I always have. As a small child I became fascinated by the miracle of metamorphosis, catching and studying tadpoles like a true proto frog geek. As an adult studying zoology at Oxford the astonishing diversity of amphibian life seemed to me to most eloquently illustrate the incredible adaptive power of evolution.

When I heard about the global amphibian crisis I was completely horrified and keen to do something about it. I discovered that most of my friends didn’t know that over a third of amphibians are going extinct or about the horrors of the Chytrid fungus. It made me aware of how little press amphibians get compared with birds and mammals so I decided that, as a writer and filmmaker, the best thing I could do would be to spread the word. So for the last few months I have been traveling around Latin America researching stories for a documentary on the crisis and writing a blog about my findings. I’ve been to some amazing places, met some inspirational characters, and discovered some truly awesome frogs. And it’s not over yet.

I started my trip by joining an expedition into the Patagonian wilderness with ZSL [Zoological Society of London] scientists to search for Darwin’s frog – the last of the gastric- or throat-brooding frogs left on the planet and the only species of animal (other than the seahorse) in which the male gets pregnant. After the eggs are fertilised the male gobbles them up and 8 weeks later he burps up baby frogs.

I was lucky enough to see and film a daddy Darwin’s frog carrying several tadpoles in his throat sack. It was one of the freakiest things I have ever seen – a mass of tadpoles wriggling in a frog’s belly – it looked like something out of the movie Alien. It gave me goose bumps to witness something so very special but sadly so very endangered. Darwin’s frog is threatened by habitat destruction and also the rampant spread of the Chytrid fungus. It would be a devastating loss to biodiversity for such an extraordinary animal to disappear off the planet.

Since then I have licked poison dart frogs in Colombia, visited infested frog farms in Uruguay and hunted mass murdering toads in Chile.

 But probably the most shocking story I have come across is that of the endangered Lake Titicaca toad, also known as the aquatic scrotum frog after its exceedingly wrinkly appearance. This monster of the deep has become the key ingredient for Peruvian backstreet Viagra. In downtown Lima I filmed juice bars where they put this toad in a blender and then drink it. A fashion which is pushing this unique amphibian to the brink of extinction.

Drinking frog frappe in downtown Lima from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

I’ve still got Panama and Costa Rica to go and will be posting from these two countries that have already been forced to brave the first wave of Chytrid. So if you like frogs then follow my blog – I think you’ll enjoy my adventure. Frogs need champions to help raise their profile and the necessary funds to save them. So, please spread the word amongst your non-frog loving friends – it’s written not just for frog geeks and they may well learn something new and start to care about the little green guys nearly as much as me.

To follow Lucy’s adventure on her blog, click here.

02/9/10

Giant Salamander: Earth's Largest Amphibian

We confess to paying most of our attention in our posts on Frogs Are Green to the stars of the amphibian world—frogs—and not so much on other amphibians. So to make up for that, we’d like to introduce you to Earth’s largest amphibian—the giant salamander of China and Japan.

BB-Japanese-Giant-Salamander

This creature is considered a living fossil because it hasn’t changed much in 30 million years. To put things in perspective, 30 million years ago our ancestors were little primates hanging from trees. It would be millions of years before some of these primates descended from the trees, and millions of years after that before the first humans.

The giant salamander lives in mountain streams and lakes and can grow up to 6 feet long. It has four digits on its front legs and five digits on its back legs and is covered with a slimy protective mucous. It spends most of its time walking on the river bottom, though it can swim quickly. On land, its small legs won’t carry it and it must drag itself along.

Like many amphibians, the giant salamander is endangered due to habitat loss. Construction of dams converts  their free-flowing stream habitats into standing water or dries them up completely. They are also vulnerable to water pollution from mining activity and farming throughout their range.

Other threats to their habitat includes deforestation around the streams. This exacerbates soil erosion and causes increased runoff and siltation of the streams, reducing water quality and making it difficult for the salamanders to get enough oxygen through their skin. In addition, the giant salamander  is considered a delicacy and is also used in traditional Chinese medicine.*

On the BBC News site, Dr. Takeyoshi Tochimoto, director of the Hanzaki Institute near Hyogo in western Japan, gives a guided tour of this unusual creature.  (“Hanzaki” is the local name for the giant salamander.) After watching this video, however, I have decided not to hug a giant salamander if I ever meet one.  They have a very large mouth and several hundred small teeth on the top and bottom and can bite if angry, causing serious injury. Generally, however, this is a shy and secretive animal and is unfortunately relatively easy to catch.

*Information from BBC Wildlife Finder. Image above courtesy of National Geographic.

01/26/10

Yasuni National Park, Ecuador: An Amphibian Eden

Yasuni National Park

Yasuni National Park, courtesy UTNE.com

Scientists have recently identified Yasuni National Park in Ecuador as one of the most biologically diverse places in South America, and perhaps on earth. As Shawn McCracken of Texas State University—San Marcos, recently said, “The 150 amphibian species throughout Yasuni is a world record for an area this size. There are more species of frogs and toads within Yasuni than are native to the United States and Canada combined.”

Unfortunately this Eden sits on oil reserves and is threatened by proposed oil development projects. McCracken and other scientists from Ecuador, the United States, and Europe have proposed a moratorium on new oil exploration until the effects of such projects can be explored.

Reading about this, we couldn’t help but think about the movie Avatar and the attempted destruction of the planet Pandora to mine unobtanium. Unfortunately, we humans aren’t as wise as the Na’vi—yet. Let’s hope that Ecuador will preserve this incredible pocket of biodiversity and not be so shortsighted as to destroy parts of it for oil.

Here is more information from Save the Frogs and the Environmental News Service.