Tag Archives: endangered frogs

02/12/10

A Frog Love Shack

While humans may need flowers, chocolate, and a candlelit dinner to get in the mood for love, amphibians have quite different requirements. The Bristol Zoo Garden in England has designed what it calls the AmphiPod to encourage frog love. The zoo opened this special “love shack” to breed two endangered frog species—the Lemur Leaf frog and the Golden Mantella.

Lemur Leaf Frog ( Hylomantis lemur), Ron Holt, Courtesy Atlanta Botanical Garden

The mating chambers will provide a safe home for these frogs, which are listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.

In this BBC video Amanda Parr takes a look around the new facility with the Bristol Zoo’s Curator of Reptiles, Tim Skelton, giving her tour a Valentine’s Day spin.

As Skelton says of the project:

Until a solution is found to help stop the [chrytid] fungus in the wild, the safekeeping and captive management of threatened amphibians is the only way to ensure their long-term survival.

Our new AmphiPod will allow us to keep frogs in a safe, isolated environment, away from any threat of disease, as well as giving our keepers the opportunity to learn the techniques required for the specialist amphibian care we can provide in the AmphiPod. In future we will be able to provide a safe haven to other amphibian species in immediate danger of extinction.

However, the Zoo is still £30,000 short of the target amount which will help pay for the continued cost of running the facility for the next three years. For a Valentine’s gift with a difference, why not make a donation towards the Zoo’s “love shack”?

To find out how you can help, please see the Bristol Zoo Gardens website for more information.

Image: , Lemur Leaf Frog (Hylomantis lemur), Ron Holt, Courtesy Atlanta  Botanical Garden, from the Amphibian Ark site

09/21/09

Teachers: Calling All Frog Artists!

Susan and I are seeking kids’ frog art—lots of it! We hope to encourage kids and their teachers to learn about and get interested in frogs, toads, and other amphibians. If you’re an elementary school teacher, parent, or educator, please send us jpegs (2mb maximum size) of your students’ or kids’ drawings or paintings of frogs and we will display them in school group galleries on the FROGS ARE GREEN blog. We’d be happy to receive images of any art form—sculpture, drawing, painting, or watercolor.

If the art work is part of a school project, please send the jpegs in one bunch. Individual drawings not part of a class project are fine, too. Include the name of your school, state, country (if not the U.S.), grade level, and child’s name for each piece of art.

Please print out the attached flyer to post in your neighborhood schools.

Here are some ways in which learning about and drawing frogs could be incorporated into the school curriculum:

Art classes

Language arts. As we’ve posted before, there so many wonderful children’s books with frog characters. Click on Literary Frogs on the right to see a few. I plan to review more titles in the coming weeks.

Rainforest unit: Rainforest frogs are some of the most colorful and interesting animals in the rainforest.

Endangered animals: Almost one-third of all amphibians are threatened with extinction, yet most kids probably don’t know this. Pick an endangered frog or toad and learn about it.

Local flora and fauna: Learn about the frogs and other amphibians in your area, and also learn to recognize their calls.

Life cycle of animals: Many state science education standards require children to learn about the life cycle of animals. Frogs have one of the most interesting life cycles—from tadpole to froglet to frog.

Below I’ve posted two YouTube videos about how to draw a frog. One is simple line drawing, and the other is more detailed, for older kids.

08/17/09

Harlequin Frogs of Costa Rica

In the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve of Costa Rica, there were once so many harlequin frog species (Atelopus) that it was hard not to step on them when walking alongside streams. But during the 1980s and 1990s, most of these frogs vanished due to deadly infectious diseases brought on by changing water and air temperatures.

Research done in Costa Rica shows that global warming makes clouds form higher above the forests where they cannot bring as much moisture to the ecosystems below. Dry spells are getting longer and in turn, many species are disappearing. Rising temperatures also shrink the cloud forests, which forces species to live closer together, spreading fungal diseases. The harlequin frog is on its way to extinction.

As J. Alan Pounds, research scientist at Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, has said on the Eco Preservation Society site:

Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger. Global warming is wreaking havoc on amphibians and will cause staggering losses of biodiversity if we don’t do something fast.

A small population of Harlequin Frogs was discovered about 6 years ago in the Rainmaker Preserve in Costa Rica, one of the last remnants of primary rainforest in the Central Pacific.

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To get some idea of the incredible diversity of wildlife in the Rainmaker Preserve (which can be visited on eco-tours) check out this video :

Here is more information about the cloud forest of Costa Rica from the Monteverde Conservation League.

I am passing along a Care2 petition to urge Costa Rica’s Ambassador Escalante to do everything in his power to save this colorful little frog, along with many other endangered species affected by climate change.

08/13/09

If Frogs Could Fly

I’ve just returned from vacation in Massachusetts, where I went whale watching off the coast with my family. On land, we also did some frog watching! My husband snapped a picture of a handsome frog in a little pond in the woods before it hopped off the lily pad. (Picture soon to come.)

Lots of frogs stories have come to my attention in just a few days, including a story about newly discovered flying frogs. The World Wildlife Fund released a report on Monday compiling recent discoveries in the Himalayas. Over 350 species have been discovered, including the world’s smallest deer and a flying frog, making the area a “treasure trove,” and one of the world’s most biological rich regions. This is an environmentally fragile area, however, that is vulnerable to climate change and development.

Tariq Aziz, the leader of the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Himalayas Initiative, a conservation program that covers India, Nepal and Bhutan, has called on these countries to develop a conservation plan for governments to give local communities more authority to manage the forests, grasslands and wetlands.

Below is a photo of the amazing flying amphibian. It glides through the air, using its long, webbed feet:

Flying Frog or Rhacophorus suffry, in Assam, India. Photo copyright Totul Bortamuli, Nepal (World Wide Fund for Nature)

Flying Frog or Rhacophorus suffry, in Assam, India. Photo copyright Totul Bortamuli (World Wide Fund for Nature)

07/27/09

Good news for The Mountain Yellow-legged Frog

I’ve been reading some pretty gloomy stories lately about the worldwide amphibian decline, but I’ve also read a surprising number of hopeful stories as well.  Here’s one Susan passed along to me:

A population of a rare, almost extinct western frog, the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog (Rana mucosa) has been found in the San Jacinto Wildnerness in Southern California. Until last month researchers had estimated only 122 adult Mountain Yellow-legged Frogs remained in the wild. This species was once widespread, but declined over the years when non-native trout were added to recreational fishing waters, disturbing local ecosystems. Tadpoles often become prey to non-native fish such as trout. 

Biologists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the San Diego Natural History Museum made the discovery. Reading this article from the Environmental News Service, I realize how many zoos, state, local, and federal government agencies need to be involved and motivated to save an endangered species.  The San Diego Zoo, for example, has a program is to breed mountain yellow-legged frogs in captivity and return them to their native habitat. 

Kudos to all biologists, museums and zoos, and government agencies involved in this effort!

Courtesy of U.S. Geological Servey
Courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey
To learn more about this, I recommend watching the PBS Nature special The Thin Green Line. (You can watch it online.)  This absorbing documentary is about all aspects of the amphibian decline, but includes a segment on the Mountain Yellow-legged Frog in Yosemite.  Check out The Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog site as well.