03/23/14

Bringing Earth Day to the Jersey City Community with Green Dream

The stage is set.

Green Dream posters are in shop windows in Jersey City Heights and downtown Hoboken. This week, they will go up in uptown Hoboken and downtown Jersey City. More postcards are on the way and the newspaper advertising is about to begin.

This is all very exciting! Frogs Are Green, an environmental awareness organization, has mostly been an online presence in the last 5 years, so it’s wonderful to see shop owners embrace the cause and smile when they see the poster. They read what the Green Dream exhibition is about, and say, “Wow, how cool, Earth Day… Save the Frogs Day… Yeah!”

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Green Dream is about bringing awareness to the Jersey City community, who may not know what’s happening to frogs on our planet and that frogs everywhere are disappearing. By showcasing selected artworks created by children around the world this April, local schools and after school arts programs in Hudson County will have the rare opportunity of seeing what children in far off lands think about frogs and the environment.

Some of the countries represented in this first exhibition at The Distillery Gallery and Artspace are: Hong Kong, Serbia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Thailand, The Philippines, Singapore, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Lithuania, Macedonia, South Africa, Kenya, Poland, Canada, Sri Lanka, Latvia, India, Indonesia, Australia, Tanzania, Madagascar, Malaysia, and Bahrain.

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I hope you will share this extraordinary event with others and support our Indiegogo fundraiser…there are just 6 days left!

Link to Campaign: http://igg.me/at/green-dream

— Susan Newman, founder, Frogs Are Green

09/3/09

Urban Frogs' Love Calls Go Unanswered in Australia

Kirsten Parris, an Australian ecologist, has discovered that noise of traffic and machinery may be contributing to the decline of frogs in Melbourne.

Female frogs are attracted to male frogs that have the loudest calls. But what if they can’t hear them calling due to all the noise? Frogs have adapted—they are expending more energy to make their croaks louder, using higher pitches to drown out the lower frequency traffic. But frogs with low-pitched croaks are at a disadvantage. According to this article in Eco-Wordly, “Without the noise of the traffic and machinery, pobblebonk frogs can be heard by females at distances up to 875 yards. But add in some traffic and other noise, and the distance is reduced to only 46 feet!”

Living in a city, I’m all for reducing noise. Just today, I heard a jackhammer, a loud droning drill next door, police sirens, not to mention the sounds of cars, trucks, and planes. The question is, how can this noise be reduced? Any ideas? Perhaps during the frog mating season, people could be a little quieter! (Not an issue in our city however. No frogs here!)

The Pobbledonk or Banjo frog is named for its distinctive "bonk" call, which sounds like a banjo string being plucked. Photo by Donna Flynn

The Pobblebonk or Banjo frog is named for its distinctive "bonk" call, which sounds like a banjo string being plucked. Photo by Donna Flynn

To learn more about Aussie frogs, check out the Frogs Australia Network.