04/26/11

Why Frogs "Belong" in Hawaii – Guest Post by Sydney Ross Singer

One of our first posts at Frogs Are Green was about the coqui, a frog native to Puerto Rico, where it exists alongside several other species of Eleutherodactylus frogs and where a biological balance is maintained. It was introduced to Hawaii in the mid- to late 1990s and has no competitors so it has spread unchecked and is considered an invasive species. But our guest author, Sydney Ross Singer,  a medical anthropologist, biologist, and author living on the Big Island of Hawaii, would like us to look at this problem from a new perspective. Perhaps this “alien” species should not be rejected and destroyed but welcomed.

April 29, 2011, is International Save the Frogs Day.

Why save the frogs?

Besides being beautiful, fascinating, a source of medicinal substances, and essential for healthy ecosystem function, frogs are canaries in the environmental coal mine. They are sensitive to pollution and climate change. And their numbers are declining at extinction rates.

That’s bad news for the rest of us living in the coal mine. Clearly, we need to change our ways.
But change is difficult for a culture to accept. Until people are dying at the rate of frogs, nothing will alter our bad cultural behaviors.

So the next best thing to do is try saving the frogs. We may not be able to stop pesticide and herbicide use, or end the deforestation and development of wild areas, or stop all the industries and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. But we can catch frogs where they are declining and find new, healthier places for them to live.

We might not have the political and economic clout to stop multinational corporations from exploiting and altering the world’s environments. But we can help refugee species flee the destruction and avoid extinction.

There are places on the planet that can serve as sanctuaries for these refugees. One place, in particular, stands out as one of the best – Hawaii.

If you move frogs from one place to another that already has frogs, the immigrants will compete with the natives, and you can possibly lose native frog populations. Hawaii, however, has no native frogs, or any native reptiles, amphibians, land snakes, or lizards. What better place to introduce frogs? Lots of insect pests to eat, warm and humid conditions, and few predators. If we wanted a sanctuary for endangered and threatened frogs, this is the place.

But wait. Can we just move a species from one part of the planet to another? Won’t it become invasive and cause damage?

It is this question that is keeping frogs from finding new homes. According to current trends in environmental thinking, species “belong” where they are “native.” You’re not supposed to move them to places where they “don’t belong.” When it comes to frogs, the Hawaii government has said they clearly “don’t belong.”

Of course, there are already frogs and toads in Hawaii, which were brought by environmental managers for insect control decades ago. Back then species were introduced deliberately to enhance biodiversity and provide needed environmental services, such as pest control, or to serve as a food source. The environment was seen as a garden for us to plant and inhabit as we saw fit.

That has all changed. Now the goal of managers is to kill introduced species in order to preserve and restore native ecosystems as they had existed prior to western contact centuries ago. They won’t get rid of the people, or the agriculture, or the chemical spraying, or the bulldozing, or the deforestation, or the development, or the intercontinental shipping, or the industries and energy policies that help cause climate change. It’s hard to change these aspects of the culture. But you sure can kill things that “don’t belong.”

What was called “exotic” or “immigrant” is now called “alien” or “invasive.” We have gone from an open immigration policy to a bio-xenophobia.

When coqui tree frogs accidentally arrived in Hawaii with shipments of plants from Florida or Puerto Rico, the response was ballistic. The mayor of Hawaii declared a state of emergency. Scientists feared the sky was falling, and that the coquis, which eat lots of insects, would decimate the insect population to the point of starving all other insectivorous creatures. The sound of the frogs, a two-toned “ko-KEE”, was described as a “shrill shriek” guaranteed to keep everyone awake at night, run down property values, and drive away tourists.

Ironically, this same coqui frog is the national animal of Puerto Rico, its native land. In fact, Puerto Ricans love this frog and its chirping sound so much that it is honored in local folklore. People describe the nighttime sound of the coqui as soothing and necessary for sleep, and Puerto Rican travelers often bring recordings of coquis with them when away from home to help them sleep.

Puerto Rico has numerous species of coqui frogs, many of which are now extinct or threatened. Unfortunately, frog numbers are declining because of fungal infections, development, climate change, and pesticide and herbicide use. So you can imagine how angry and upset Puerto Ricans were when Hawaii announced its Frog War to eradicate the newly arrived coquis.

Over the past 10 years, millions of dollars have been spent in Hawaii trying to kill coquis. And despite wide cost-saving cuts in government spending, there is still money to kill coquis.

At first, they tried an experiment to kill coquis with concentrated caffeine, giving the frogs a heart attack. A special emergency exemption was needed from the EPA to allow this spraying of caffeine into the environment. It’s impact on humans, pets, plants, lizards, and other non-target species was unknown, or what it would do once it entered the groundwater and flowed to the oceans. Chemical warfare suits were needed by applicators to prevent exposure to the highly dangerous caffeine, which was at concentrations 100 times that of coffee. There is no antidote for caffeine poisoning.

When the caffeine experiment proved untenable and too dangerous, citric acid was encouraged as a frogicide. Sprayers soaked the forests with acid, sometimes sprayed from helicopters, to drench the tiny frogs and burn them to death. Of course, this also killed plants and other critters, such as lizards. But since lizards are non-native, nobody in the government cared.

But citric acid is expensive. So another experiment was tried, using hydrated lime to burn the frogs. This caustic chemical can also cause irreversible eye and lung damage to people and pets on contact, so another emergency exemption was needed from the EPA to experiment with it. As it turned out, the hydrated lime didn’t work very well, and it killed lots of plants.

So the University of Hawaii experimented on developing a frog disease to unleash on the frogs. They tried a fungus to infect the frogs, the same one killing frogs elsewhere in the world. They realized the fungus might also kill the geckos, skinks, anoles, and other lizards, as well as the toads. But since none are native to Hawaii, none of the eradicators cared. In fact, destroying all the lizards and toads would be considered a plus. The coqui frogs, however, survived the fungus, so it was never released wide scale.

By now you may wonder how people can get away with this abuse of frogs. Aren’t there laws protecting animals from this type of cruelty?

There are. So to get around the laws the Hawaii legislature passed a law defining the coqui as a “pest.” Pest species are exempted from humane laws.

This moral depravity reached its zenith in 2007, with a planned Coqui Bounty Hunter contest to be held by public schools on the Big Island. Schools instructed students to kill coquis, either by burning them with acid, cooking them alive, or freezing them. The school with the most “kills” would receive a prize — the violent video games Playstation 3 and Xbox. The contest was canceled once it was pointed out to the schools that students are supposed to receive humane, not inhumane, education.

Despite the eradication attempts, the frogs spread. Actually, sometimes they spread because of these attempts, since coquis try leaving areas disturbed by spraying. An interisland quarantine on the coqui still exists, requiring all plant nurseries to treat plants with hot water, proven lethal to coquis and their eggs, prior to transport to other islands. But the coquis seem to frequently survive that, too.

So here is the irony. Frogs are disappearing from everywhere in the world except in Hawaii, where the government is trying to make them disappear.

Yet, despite the endless anti-coqui propaganda, people are coming to like the little coqui frog, especially those people who have arrived to Hawaii since the advent of the coqui. To these people, the sound of Hawaii includes the coqui. To these new human immigrants, the coqui is normal, and enjoyable. They understand why the Puerto Ricans love these frogs.

If we are to save the world’s endangered and threatened frogs, and other wildlife that needs rescue from the human-damaged world, we need to change our environmental immigration policy. It doesn’t matter where a species is native, or where it “belongs”. That these species survive is what matters. And this may require finding them a new home.

This is not to suggest that we bring in species willy nilly, without thinking about the impact on local species. We need careful study to know which species can be introduced, and where. But unless we open our borders, and our hearts, to these refugee species, they will die.

We caused their problems. Their fate is in our hands.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sydney Ross Singer
is a medical anthropologist, biologist, and author living on the Big Island of Hawaii. He is an outspoken defender of the Hawaiian coqui frog, has created Hawaii’s first coqui frog sanctuary, and has been featured on Animal Planet, PBS Nature, BBC radio, and Univision. He is co-author of Panic in Paradise: Invasive Species, Hysteria, and the Hawaiian Coqui Frog War (ISCD Press, 2005). His website is www.HawaiianCoqui.org.

02/9/11

Frogs Help Scientists Understand Childhood Heart Disease

We recently came across a fascinating article in Nature News, “Frogs and Humans Are Kissing Cousins.” You might be surprised to learn that you have a whole lot more in common with frogs than you thought—at a genetic level, anyway. The gene order of the Western Clawed Frog (Xenopus tropicalis) shows surprising similarity to that of mammals. This frog joins a list of sequenced model organisms, including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode, and fruit fly. This amphibian’s genome closely resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large sections of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in that in mammals. Yet this close genomic relationship doesn’t hold true for some other vertebrates.

Because of this similarity in genome sequence, the frog can be used as a human disease model. Within conserved sequences in the Western Clawed Frog, the researchers found genes that are similar to 80% of human genes known to be associated with diseases. As quoted in the article, Frank Conlon, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said,”It’s going to make genetic screens in Xenopus immediately more useful.”

courtesy of AnMed Health (www.anmedhealth.org)

As reported recently in an article, “Frogs Help Scientists Combat Childhood Heart Disease,” in the Yale Daily News, for example, a study by Yale cardiology researchers has found a number of genes that can be used to diagnose and treat children who have a birth defect called heterotaxy, which causes the heart to be severely malformed. Their findings, published in late January, suggest that certain genes that affect human embryonic development can cause abnormalities leading to congenital heart disease.

One percent of all newborns develop congenital heart disease, and most patients need surgery to survive. But even with a procedure, outcomes can often be poor and patients may require constant medical supervision over the years.

In children who have heterotaxy, the body cannot properly place the organs on the left or right sides, which causes problems because normal human hearts sit on the left side of our bodies. The left and right side of the heart also perform very different functions: the right side pumps blood to lungs, while the left pumps blood to the body,  so correct placement of the heart in the body is extremely important.

But this study will help scientists better understand what causes congenital heart disease and will give researchers some idea of which genes lead to better or worse outcomes. As quoted in the article, Mustafa Khohka, assistant professor of pediatrics and genetics at Yale, and a co-author of the paper, said, “We also hope to improve our understanding of the genes that affect left-right [axis] development and the mechanisms involved in determining your left side from your right side.”

Frogs make a good model for studying heterotaxy in human embryos, he explained, because the left-right axis develops the same way in both humans and frogs. By examining the number of genetic copy variations in frogs, the scientists were able to identify genes that cause left-right axis mutations. Unfortunately, the findings may not benefit children with heterotaxy for some time.

“Patients with heterotaxy defects include some of the most severely affected individuals we see,” said Dr. Anne M. Murphy, professor of pediatric cardiology at Johns Hopkins University, as quoted in the article. “While discovery of the root causes of the disorder will not immediately translate into better care, there are already emerging examples in our field where understanding the molecular pathways of disease affecting the heart could offer new therapies.”

The researchers were recently awarded a grant by the National Institutes of Health which will fund their studies for the next five years. The group plans to identify more patients with congenital heart disease and the mutations that may have caused it.

We think this study is just one more reason to kiss a frog today!

01/20/11

Rediscovering Haiti's Lost Frogs

Haiti recently marked the anniversary of the January 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated the country, killing over 300,000 people, and leaving almost a million people homeless.

Recently scientists from Conservation International (CI) and the Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG) of IUCN reported a bit of news they hope might become a source of pride and hope for the country’s environmental future: the surprising re-discovery of six species of  frogs in the country’s severely degraded tropical forests, species that had been lost to science for nearly two decades.

Large-scale deforestation has left the country with less than two-percent of its original forest cover and has degraded most of the fresh water ecosystems. Yet Haitians depend on the cloud forests of the southwest mountains as two of the last remaining pockets of environmental health and natural wealth in Haiti.

This expedition was part of Conservation International’s global Search for Lost Frogs campaign, in which CI’s Amphibian Conservation Specialist Dr. Robin Moore, in partnership with Dr. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University, searched for the La Selle Grass frog (E. glanduliferoides), which had not been seen in more than 25 years. They also hoped to assess the status of Haiti’s 48 other native species of amphibians.

The scientists did not find the La Selle Grass frog, but to their surprise, they rediscovered several other remarkable frog species, most of which haven’t been seen since 1991. As Dr. Moore says, “We went in looking for one missing species and found a treasure trove of others. That, to me, represents a welcome dose of resilience and hope for the people and wildlife of Haiti.”

Dr. Moore says that a common assumption about Haiti is that there isn’t anything left to save. Yet this is not true. According to Moore, there are biologically rich pockets intact, despite tremendous environmental pressures. Haiti now has the opportunity to design their reconstruction plans around these pockets, and to protect them, so that these natural areas can more effectively act as buffers to climate change and natural disasters. However, there is little time to waste: 92 percent of Haiti’s amphibian populations are listed as threatened and are in danger of disappearing.

“The biodiversity of Haiti, including its frogs, is approaching a mass extinction event caused by massive and nearly complete deforestation. Unless the global community comes up with a solution soon, we will lose many unique species forever,” said Dr. Hedges.

Amid the backdrop of Haiti’s struggle to rebuild, Moore added some important context:

The devastation that the people of Haiti are still coping with is almost unimaginable. I have never seen anything like it. Clearly, the health of Haiti’s frogs is not anyone’s primary concern here. However, the ecosystems these frogs inhabit, and their ability to support life, is critically important to the long-term well-being of Haiti’s people, who depend on healthy forests for their livelihoods, food security, and fresh water. Amphibians are what we call barometer species of our planet’s health. They’re like the canaries in the coal mine. As they disappear, so too do the natural resources people depend upon to survive.

Here are a few of the rediscovered frogs:

Hispaniolan Ventriloquial Frog (Eleutherodactylus dolomedes). This frog is named after its call that the frog projects like a ventriloquist. Its unusual call consists of a rapid seven-note series of chirps, with the initial four notes rising slowly in pitch before plateauing; the call is released in widely-spaced intervals, often minutes apart. Prior to this expedition, the species was only known from a few individuals.

Mozart’s Frog (E. amadeus). Called Mozart’s frog because when Dr. Hedges, who discovered the species, made an audiospectrogram of the call, it coincidentally resembled musical notes. Its call is a four-note muffled whistle at night; usually given as a shorter two-note call at dawn and dusk.

La Hotte Glanded Frog (E. glandulifer). This frog could be called Old Blue Eyes: its most distinctive feature are its striking blue sapphire-colored eyes – a highly unusual trait among amphibians.

La Hotte Glanded Frog, Eleutherodactylus glandulifer. Copyright Claudio Contreras /iLCP.

Macaya Breast-spot frog. (E. thorectes). Approximately the size of a grape, this is one of the smallest frogs in the world. In Haiti, this species has a very restricted range, occurring only on the peaks of Formon and Macaya at high elevations on the Massif de la Hotte.

Juvenile Macaya breast-spot landfrog, E. thorectes. Photo copyright Robin Moore/iLCP

Hispaniolan Crowned Frog. This species was named after a row of protuberances that resemble a crown on the back of its head. Prior to this expedition, the species was known from less than 10 individuals, and is likely to be extremely rare. It is an arboreal species, occurring in high-elevation cloud forest. Males call from bromeliads or orchids, which they seem to require for reproduction.

Macaya Burrowing Frog. Haiti is now the only place where two burrowing frogs are known to share the same habitat. This species has big jet black eyes and bright orange flashes on the legs. Males call from shallow, underground chambers and eggs are also laid underground, where they hatch directly into froglets.

For more information, please visit Conservation International’s site, which includes more photos, recordings of the frogs’ calls, and a video.

01/6/11

The Canyon Tree Frog – Guest Post, Allystair D. Jones

We are extremely pleased to feature a guest post by Allystair D. Jones, who studied the canyon tree frog population in Zion National Park, Utah, to determine if the frogs were infected with the chytrid fungus, a disease that is wiping out amphibian populations worldwide. His research will be published by The Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters in May 2011. 

Chytridiomycosis is an emerging infectious disease that is plaguing the world and causing the extinction of frogs around the globe. This disease is believed to have come from Africa in 1938 when frogs were sometimes used to diagnose pregnancy. This disease is responsible for the extinction of at least 30 populations of frogs and has found its way into Arizona killing the canyon tree frog (Hyla arenicolor). The Chytrid disease can move very quickly and is transferred through water, contact, or even muddy boots from hikers. My research is aimed at watching the population of canyon tree frogs in Zion National Park and as of the summer of 2009 it appeared this population is safe. 

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

The geography of Zion National Park is very unique. Zion is the middle step in the grand staircase with the Grand Canyon being the first and Bryce Canyon the last. This made locating the frogs often very difficult and technical rappelling and climbing skills were needed. I have been climbing for more than 20 years so I was especially suited for this study. I travelled through the canyons where this frog likes to live and captured, swabbed their bellies with a cotton swab, and released them back to the location that I caught them. I used the prescribed swabbing techniques and noted the location and time of the swab. I then saved the samples for DNA testing. 

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

I tested all the samples with a general fungus primer, meaning I tested it to see if there was any fungus at all even if it wasn’t the chytrid fungus. Those that were positive for a fungus were tested for the specific chytrid. The results were very pleasing as none of the samples came up positive for this deadly fungus. This was the first study of this kind done in Zion National Park and during the following year there should be more if the funding keeps up. 

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

It was noted in a review journal article at the beginning of this year (Kilpatrick et al 2010) that to help combat this disease we would need to find a viable population of frogs that are not already infected. I submit this population of frogs to be that population, that if monitored with care may help us gain ground in fighting this deadly disease. We need to increase our efforts to learn about this disease. 

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

Photo by Allystair D. Jones

 

For more information or comments my email is: ajones67@dmail.dixie.edu

*KILPATRICK, A. M., BRIGGS, C. J. & DASZAK, P. 2010. The ecology and impact of chytridiomycosis: an emerging disease of amphibians. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25, 109-118.