Male 1: They are by all accounts, just another little member of Arizona’s animal community. But sadly, they are also one of the victims of man’s influence upon the landscape.
The Chiricahua leopard frog was once common along the Mogollon Rim in the White Mountains and the Sky Islands of Southeastern Arizona. But in the 1970’s, their numbers began to decline drastically.
Mike Sredl: The amphibian populations worldwide have declined dramatically to a point where many scientists are very alarmed at the future of many, many species of the six thousand or so that are known to human kind right now. To a point where we may have a very small fraction of that six thousand species left after this decline, actually place itself out.
The Chiricahua leopard frog is one of those species that has declined as a result of a multitude of factors – habitat destruction, introduce species, disease and the recent drought that Arizona has been in over the last decade or so are probably the four most important factors for leading the declines of Chiricahua leopard frog populations.
Male 1: Now it’s up to biologists like Mike Sredl and his team to try to restore the balance of nature and help the _- leopard frog survive in its natural habitat. And like everything in nature, it is no simple task.
First you have to find the remaining fertilized eggs in the wild and then take them to a facility like Bubbling Ponds Fish Hatchery which has converted one of its buildings into a frog hatchery.
Mike Sredl: We’ve brought in egg masses from the wild. So we’re taking advantage of the natural genetic diversity of wild population. This egg mass was brought to Bubbling Ponds, where they hatch into tadpoles and actually some have metamorphosed into little froglets. And the reason we head start is that the probability in the wild of a tiny little amphibian egg making it into a reproductive adult is somewhere around 10 percent, very small percentage. Now when we bring that same egg into a captive situation, we can have 90 percent survival shift to a reproductive age so we’re actually creating many more individuals to release to many more sites and our objective is to establish enough populations so the Chiricahua leopard frog no longer needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act and can be delisted from that act.
Male 1: Meanwhile, as the tadpoles are developing in the hatchery, work on the field is going on to renovate their habitat. There’s not much point in raising frogs if you don’t have anywhere to put them once they’re grown.
Mike Sredl: This small spring near Payson was renovated a year and a half ago and cooperators from US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, Phoenix Zoo, came up here and we installed these long structures that have deepen the pools behind me and have created beautiful habitat for Chiricahua leopard frogs and their tadpoles. The tadpoles of course, if you remember from your high school biology, live in the water and they need to, they feed and they’re wholly aquatic. Once they metamorphosed into air-breathing frogs, then they will forge in the vegetation behind me and it will actually be a very wonderful little frog habitat and a haven for Chiricahua leopard frogs.
Male 1: And there are many small sites like this spread along the natural springs and creeks in the White Mountains, Mogollon Rim and Southeastern Arizona. The renovations of these sites would be impossible without many cooperating partners.
Mike Sredl: This small spring is located on Tonto National Forest who has been an exceptional partner in Chiricahua leopard frog conservation and recovery. And this small spring at one time was one of the few populations of this region of Chiricahua leopard frogs. And despite its smallness, it was a very reproductive population. But over time, it became silted in with mud from runoff and the growth of vegetation encroaching on the open water that Chiricahua leopard frogs need to reproduce and complete their life cycle, so we went in and we renovated it with partners from the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Phoenix Zoo. And we removed a lot of the soft muds and made a deeper water column. We had lined it to make it more permanent so Chiricahua leopard frogs need year-round water as do their tadpoles. And then we did other few small things such as put some protective fencing around it because even though we’d like to have naturally functioning populations, at a certain point we need to take at a little extra precaution especially when we’re dealing with one of the few populations in the region. So we put a hogged wire fence around it which is a little unsightly. And we plan on removing that at a later date once this population gets well established.
Male 1: Being a wildlife biologist with a passion for his work, Mike sometimes needs to improvise when necessary.
Mike Sredl: A one point we knew of only two male frogs, two male Chiricahua leopard frogs from this small spring and I actually had them at my house over one winter because we didn’t have captive facilities available at that time.
Male 1: While the renovation work is going on in the field, back in the hatchery, the tadpoles and froglets are being prepared for their long trip back to the wild which of course is not a simple process either.
Mike Sredl: We collected the tadpoles and frogs from these raise ways at Bubbling Ponds and currently they’re soaking in medication to treat them of a deadly fungal disease that affected the world’s amphibian populations. This disease or the pathogen of this disease is called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. However, “Bd” will suffice as a much shorter, easier to pronounce name. The adult frogs are soaking in a medication that is not too dissimilar from John Madden’s “Tough Actin” Tinactin that you spray on your feet for athlete’s foot. And the tadpoles are soaking in a slightly different medication. The reason we do that is we want to put out frogs to the wild that are healthy and disease-free.
Once the frogs are treated for the disease, we’re going to package them up. The frogs get packaged in small little Gladware containers with a nice moist substrate and the tadpoles will be put in large coolers which will have aerators and they’ll be bubbling oxygen through the water.
Male 1: Then it is time to load up the truck and make that long treck from the hatchery to the newly-renovated creeks along the Rim country.
Mike Sredl: We, establishing frog populations, is an effort done by many cooperators including Tonto National Forest, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Phoenix Zoo, our own Bubbling Ponds Fish Hatchery. Different partners will cooperate on different aspects of the project from habitat renovation that Tonto National Forest has done, to other aspects of introductions that US Fish and Wildlife Service and other logistical factors in helping us get the frogs out to the wild, and the Phoenix Zoo and Bubbling Ponds have been tremendous help in rearing frogs from eggs to small tadpoles or frogs.
Male 1: Once on site, the tadpoles and frogs were given about an hour to acclimate to the water temperature and chemistry of the creek. Creek water was added to the coolers which helped the tadpoles and the frogs, in cased in their Gladware carriers, were placed in the creek to cool.
Another batch of Chiricahua leopard frogs was released in this same spot previously and they seem to be doing well.
Mike Sredl: Just in a walk through minutes ago, I saw several Chiricahua leopard frogs sunning themselves on the banks right over here. And they look just wonderful, nice and good body proportions. They’ve put on a lot of size since we released them which was about little of a year and a half ago or so, and so far things are looking really great at this spring.
Male 1: Finally, it is time to complete this cycle of their life and begin a new one. From an egg mass collected in the wild, to hatchery-reared adolescents, they are now ready to go grow to adulthood back in the stream they originally came from. The goal of all this work is to reestablish the population of the Chiricahua leopard frogs to a point where they are self-sustaining and can be removed from the endangered species list.
Mike Sredl: Delisting is something that I hope that within the next five to 10 years, we’ll have a better idea of how much more work will need to be done in order for the frog to be delisted. We need to have what are called meta-populations of frogs and each of eight recover units, and these recover units are in Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona. And we need to have two meta-populations, and think of a meta-population as a series of ponds that are connected by dispersal corridors. It sounds like a very technical term but it’s really a rather simple thing to look at on the landscape. And we need to have two of these meta-populations as well as one isolated robust population, and that isolated robust population is a hedge against catastrophe or large, or disease. So within each recover unit, and the recover unit we’re going to is essentially the Mogollon Rim. So a little bit east of here, Camp Berry, stretching all the way over to about the White Mountains. So if you know that area, that is the former historical range of Chiricahua leopard frog, one piece of the former historical range of the Chiricahua leopard frogs.
Male 1: A lot of people my ask “Why”? “Why bother saving these little frogs at all?” Like we’ve said earlier, there are no simple answers.
Mike Sredl: A lot of people ask what good are Chiricahua leopard frogs or any frog for that matter. Well, frogs are important indicators of the health of ecosystems. They’ve got moist permeable skin that is susceptible to pollutants in the water or pollutants in the air, because really frogs’ skin is an organ such as our lungs and they actually breathe through and take in nutrients and other important elements through their skin. They are also important predators, competitors and members of many ecosystems in which they’re found. In one ecosystem where they are measured, there are actually more amphibian biomass than even breathing birds. So they’re important bio-indicators. They are potential sources of medicines beneficial for humans and they play an important role in the ecosystem of our planet earth.
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