The other day Susan and I ventured into New York City to see the traveling exhibit Frogs: A Chorus of Colors again at the American Museum of Natural History because we enjoyed it so much the first time we saw it. The exhibit features over 200 live frogs in re-created natural habitats, complete with rock ledges, live plants, and waterfalls.
If you live near NYC or need an excuse to visit the Big Apple, we highly recommend this exhibit, which runs until January 8, 2012. Most of the exhibits are at eye level for even the youngest kids, who had fun trying to spot the well-camouflaged frogs. They can also push buttons to hear frog calls, view videos of frogs in action, and even dissect a frog virtually with a program called Froguts. (Teachers take note: the kids were fascinated by this and several tried their hand at it.)
Here are a few things you will learn:
The Cuban tree frog is probably the smallest frog at only 1/2 inch in length
The cane toad lays 35,000 eggs in a single string
The Australian water-holding frog digs in desert soils and can remain underground for years
The world’s biggest frog is the West African goliath at 15 inches and weighing 7 lbs, as much as a newborn infant.
The stars of the exhibit were the dart poison frogs. Their jewel-like colors warn predators not to eat them. One type of poison dart frog can kill 20,000 mice or 10 people with its poison, which is excreted through the skin. As the label on this exhibit says, “Don’t kiss these frogs!” The baby dart poison frogs, hiding in the palm leaves, were pretty cute. They were about the size of a fingernail.
Susan took some videos of the frogs in the exhibit:
Note: This is a partial repost of our original visit in 2009
Conservation International has announced the rediscovery in Malaysian Borneo of a vanished amphibian: the long-legged Borneo rainbow toad. Below is one of the first photographs ever of this long-legged brightly colored toad.
Inspired by Conservation International’s (CI) Global Search for Lost Amphibians, scientists with support from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak found three individuals of the missing toad species, up a tree during a night time search after months of scouring remote forests.
The Sambas Stream Toad, or Bornean Rainbow Toad (Ansonia latidisca) was last seen in 1924. Prior to the rediscovery, the mysterious and long-legged toad was known only by illustrations. The rare toad was listed by Conservation International as one of the World’s 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs, in a global campaign to seek out amphibians that have not been seen in a decade or longer.
Dr. Indraneil Das of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) and his team searched at night along the high rugged ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range of Western Sarawak. They did not find the elusive toad after searching for several months, but the team didn’t give up. Dr. Das eventually changed his team’s strategy to include higher elevations and they resumed the search. Pui Yong Min, one of Dr Das’s graduate students, found a small toad up a tree. When he realized it was the long-lost toad, Dr. Das expressed relief at the discovery:
Thrilling discoveries like this beautiful toad, and the critical importance of amphibians to healthy ecosystems, are what fuel us to keep searching for lost species. They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering, which is why targeted protection and conservation is so important. Amphibians are indicators of environmental health, with direct implications for human health. Their benefits to people should not be underestimated.
Amphibian specialist Dr. Robin Moore of Conservation International, who launched the Global Search for Lost Amphibians to raise awareness of the serious plight of the world’s declining amphibian populations, also expressed disbelief when Das shared the good news. As he said, “It is good to know that nature can surprise us when we are close to giving up hope, especially amidst our planet’s escalating extinction crisis. “
The Global Search for Lost Amphibians, launched by Conservation International (CI) and the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG), with support from Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC), sought to document the survival status and whereabouts of threatened species of amphibians which they had hoped were holding on in a few remote places.
The search took place between August and December 2010 in 21 countries, on five continents, and involved 126 researchers. It represented a pioneering effort to coordinate and track such a large number of “lost” amphibians. The goal was to establish whether populations have survived increasing pressures such as habitat loss, climate change, and disease, and to help scientists better understand what is behind the amphibian crisis.
After 80 years, the rainbow toad is most definitely ready for his/her close up:
If you live in the city and you hear a strange new noise this summer, it might be a gray tree frog that’s moved to your neighborhood. According to an article by Sharon Woods Harris in the Pekin (Ill) Daily Times, tree frogs are moving to the city because of recent high rains, which have left pools of water that are like vernal pools: females can lay their eggs in the pools without fear of fish eating them.
Gray tree frogs are typically found in woodsy, wet areas, but this year they’ve been found hanging out on decks and crawling up the sides of houses. The gray tree frog is a good climber—it can scale glass with the use of its enlarged toe pads. It catches insects and other invertebrates for food so street lamps or other city lights are great bug-catching places.
Gray Tree Frog, courtesy of Gardening to Distraction
The scientific name for gray tree frogs is Hyla versicolor: they camouflage themselves by changing colors from gray to green, and are typically no larger than 1.5 to 2 in (3.8 to 5.1 cm).
Gray tree frogs can be found in most of the eastern half of the United States, as far west as central Texas. They can also be found in Canada in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba, and New Brunswick.
Once the heavy heat of July comes and the water dries up, the frogs will probably return to cooler, moist areas. In the meantime, if you live in the city, keep your ears open for the distinctive trill of the male tree frog calling for a mate.
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.
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.
It’s finally Spring, and in our part of the world, we’re ecstatic. We’ve had a rough winter—we had snow and ice on our city streets every day for about 40 days in a row! The crocuses are blooming in my backyard, and outside the city, frogs are springing to life.
In a way, Spring is a good time to think about our “inner amphibian.” After all, mammals are descended from animals that moved from aquatic environments onto the land over three million years ago. As embryos, our heads in the early stages of development look remarkably similar to shark embryos—with gill arches and all. The metamorphosis of frogs is a process that’s not all that different from what all vertebrates go through, but the difference is that most of the development of birds, reptiles, and mammals—such as the growth of the lungs and limbs—takes place inside an egg or inside the mother instead.*
FROM EGG TO TADPOLE
A female frog first lays eggs underwater, sometimes hundreds of eggs, which form into a jelly-like clump called frogspawn, which floats on the water. Most of these eggs become food for other pond life, but some survive.
The tiny animal inside the egg grows for about a month, then hatches out of the egg. It looks like a small black fish and breathes underwater with feathery gills on each side of its head.
The tadpole’s tail begins to grow; it wiggles its tail to swim. Tadpoles are also called polliwogs. (The word “polliwog” is from Middle English polwygle. Pol means “head” and wiglen means to “to wiggle”). The tadpole eats algae and other plants that grow underwater.
Tadpole. Photo from Wikipedia.
FROM TADPOLE TO FROGLET
After several weeks, tadpoles begin their metamorphosis. Two tiny bumps appear near the tadpole’s tail—these will grow into back legs.
Two more bumps appear near the frog’s head—these will grow into front legs. Lungs begin to grow inside the tadpole’s body and the feathery gills disappear so that the tadpole will be able to breathe air.
The tadpole now has legs for hopping and walking, lungs for breathing air, but its long tail is awkward on land. Until the tail shrinks and is absorbed into its body, the froglet stays in or near the water.
Froglet with tail. Photo courtesy of www.scienceprojectlab.com
FROGLET TO FROG
When the tail is gone, the frog has completed its metamorphosis. The young frog will now feed on small insects, caught with their long, sticky tongues. It will eventually move away from the pond and find a safe place to grow.
This Spring, take some time to visit a nearby pond or swamp and see this process yourself. And check out the poster below that Susan designed for Earth Day, inspired by a photo by FROGS ARE GREEN photographer friend Joe Furman. All proceeds go to help our amphibian friends.
*I found this idea in Thomas Marent’s lovely and informative book, FROG.
Ever wonder what the difference is between a frog and a toad? At FROGS ARE GREEN, we thought we’d enlighten you so that when you’re hiking in the woods and someone says, “Look at that cute frog!” you’ll be able to say, “That’s not a frog, that’s a toad!”
Frogs and toads are both amphibians in the order Anura. Of the three major classifications of amphibians, frogs make up the vast majority, about 90 percent of all amphibian species (the other types of amphibians are salamanders and caecilians). Toads are a sub-classification of frogs, meaning that all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads (clear so far?).
WHERE DO FROGS AND TOADS LIVE
Both frogs and toads live near ponds, swamps, and marshes. Frogs can live on the ground or in trees. But toads live only on the ground.
SLIM VS. CHUBBY
Both frogs and toads have stubby front legs and they are both about the same size. But frogs have slimmer bodies and longer hind legs. These limbs are especially good for leaping from tree to tree and for swimming.
Toads are chubbier than frogs. They have shorter hind legs, good for hopping around on the ground, or walking and crawling. They are a bit slower and less active than their leaping frog cousins.
WEBBED FEET OR NOT?
Frogs usually have webbed hind feet, and some have webbed front feet. Some frogs, such as tree frogs, have pads on their toes that help frogs climb trees, or even stick to a glass window.
Most toads don’t have webbed feet or sticky toe pads. They move by a series of short hops on land.
SMOOTH VS. WARTY
Frog skin is usually smooth and moist. Toad skin is drier and bumpier. The bumps look like warts and its skin feels rough (don’t worry—you won’t get warts if you touch a toad’s skin!).
FROG AND TOAD EGGS
Frogs lay eggs in bunches, or clusters, which have a jelly-like substance around them. Toads lay their eggs in lines, or strands, on leaves of plants that live in the water.
These are the basic differences between frogs and toads, but things do get confusing. You can’t necessarily go by the common name of the frog or toad. In some parts of the world, especially tropical areas near the equator, frogs and toads often look alike. For example, the Harlequin frog is actually a toad. The only way to tell these frogs and toads apart is to look at the differences in their teeth and bones. Also, if a frog-like amphibian lives in a dry area, it is most likely a toad.
But for the most part, these guidelines will help you distinguish between the two types of amphibians. So this summer get your camera, your notebook, and binoculars and see if you can find some of these intriguing animals in the woods, near marshes and ponds, or even in your backyard.
