Frog Blog Manchester sent me ISO more information about the conservation efforts at Copenhagen Zoo for the fire-bellied toad...

The number of fire-bellied toads in this country halved during each decade of the 20th century. With just eight populations left in Denmark, animal experts are working overtime to save them.

It is the dream of every zookeeper to work with animals that will be sent back into the wild to take care of themselves,’ said zookeeper Lene Vestergren of the Copenhagen Zoo’s Tropical House in an interview this week with daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende.
An endowment of DKK 6 million over a five-year period has been bequeathed by the EU-LIFE project to save exotic animal species in Europe; though when it comes to the mystique of the endangered stars of the animal kingdom, the tiny fire-bellied toad seems largely unexotic. Today, Lene Vestergren is part of a Copenhagen Zoo nursery project to breed endangered amphibians, where she is charged with the care of young fire-bellied toads being groomed to return to their homeland on the island of Hjortø, in Southern Funen.

The Hjortø population of fire-bellied toads is so rare that experts are unwilling to take chances on the toads reproducing successfully in their natural habitat. Five males and five females are currently under foster care at the Copenhagen Zoo, whilst the Terrarium in Vissenbjerg is hoping yet another team of Hjortø toads will be do their part to be fruitful and multiply. Berlingske Tidende reported this week that the fully-grown female fire-bellied toad is the size of a toothpick box, while the adult male is slightly smaller.

Toad habitats in Southern Funen, Avernakø, Hjortø, Western Zealand north of Kalundborg, and the Storebælt Coast in Southern Zealand have been identified in the EU Habitat Directive for the protection and improvement of endangered habitats. The EU is footing the bill for half of the fire-bellied toad rescue project, and the three so-called ‘Toad Counties’ are paying the rest.

This past spring, the Copenhagen Zoo took 600 tadpoles from Knudshoved Odde in Southern Zealand as part of the toad rescue project. By July, zoo officials reported, the small fry had grown into a population of 360 young fire-bellied toads that were reintroduced to their natural habitat.

In Danish, the toads are known as ‘bell frogs,’ because of the traditional springtime chirping that serves as a mating call from males to females. The sound of whole populations chirping together resembles the sound of distant church bells.

Source: The Copenhagen Post

Kirtland Peterson

A workshop at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has dramatically improved the ability of conservationists and regulatory agencies to monitor the spread of chytridiomycosis — one of the deadliest frog diseases on Earth.

Caused by the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, this disease is probably responsible for the extinction of nearly 100 frog species since the 1970s. During the past decade, the epidemic swept from the highlands of Costa Rica through western Panama. It is now moving toward eastern Panama from Colombia.

“The fungus spreads so rapidly because humans ship nearly 100 million amphibians around the world each year, mainly for food and pets, with virtually no disease testing,” said Kerry Kriger, executive director of the U.S. non-profit, Save The Frogs! and course instructor with Sandra Victoria Flechas from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

This hands-on course trained 22 scientists on the frontlines to use a genetic technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction, PCR, which detects even single fungal spores.

“We’ve probably just doubled the number of people in the world who know how to use this method to detect the pathogen,” said Kriger. “The beauty of PCR is that you don’t have to kill the frog or take a skin sample to test for the disease.”

Read more: ScienceDaily

Kirtland Peterson

The fungus now decimating frog populations around the world does its damage by impairing the animals’ ability to absorb electrolytes through their skin. This discovery may eventually lead to treatments that make the disease less lethal.

Biologists now generally agree that the fungal disease known as chytridiomycosis is responsible for the worldwide die-off of frogs that has caused a conservation crisis in recent years. However, the fungus affects only the outer layers of the skin, leaving few clues to why it is so lethal.

But now Jamie Voyles of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and colleagues have an answer. In diseased frogs, the skin’s ability to take up sodium and potassium ions from the water decreases by more than 50 per cent, they found. As a result, the concentration of these two ions in the frogs’ blood fell by 20 and 50 per cent, respectively. This ion loss – similar to the hyponatraemia that a human athlete might experience from drinking too much water too fast – eventually leads to cardiac arrest and death.

The researchers found they could delay death by giving diseased frogs an oral electrolyte-replacement solution – a sort of froggy Gatorade. Fungal damage to the skin was too extensive for this to prevent death altogether, the study represents a first step toward finding an effective treatment for the disease, Voyles says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176765

Reported in New Scientist

Kirtland Peterson

Scientists have unravelled the mechanism by which the fungal disease chytridiomycosis kills its victims.

The fungus is steadily spreading through populations of frogs and other amphibians worldwide, and has sent some species extinct in just a few years.

Researchers now report in the journal Science that the fungus kills by changing the animals’ electrolyte balance, resulting in cardiac arrest.

The finding is described as a “key step” in understanding the epidemic.

Read more: BBC

Kirtland Peterson

When confronted by a predator, some animals fight, others run while a few hide, hoping not to be noticed.

The pebble toad of Venezuela does something altogether different: it curls up like a ball and throws itself down the side of a mountain.

By doing so, the tiny creature bounces down the rocks just like a rubber ball.

This extraordinary tumbling behaviour has been filmed in slow motion by a BBC crew for the natural history programme Life.

The pebble toad (Oreophrynella niger) is tiny, measuring just a few centimetres long.

It lives on the top of a type of mountain known as a tepui, which occur across the Guiana Highlands in South America.

Read more: BBC; video

Kirtland Peterson

A scientist in India says he has found three rare species of frogs that make nests in which to lay their eggs.

Dr SD Biju of Delhi University says the frogs make nests after laying eggs to protect them from heat and predators.

The discovery was made in the rainforests of the Western Ghats mountain range in the southern Indian states of Kerala and Karnataka.

It comes after 20 years of intensive research carried out in Wayanad in Kerala and Coorg in Karnataka.

‘Extremely rare’

The tiny frogs, which measure up to 12cm (about five inches) in length, roll leaves from top to bottom to make a cocoon and produce a sticky substance to close the ends to secure the eggs.

“These are extremely rare frogs, the only ones of their kind found in Asia,” Dr Biju told the BBC.

Full story: BBC

Kirtland Peterson

Here you can find the latest live footage of events as they happen:

October 6th 2009 – discovering red-eyed treefrogs have laid eggs:

Check it out! Click on picture above, or here.

Kirtland Peterson

James, who lives in Palm Beach, Florida, had decorated his back yard with colourful lights after noticing that frogs had worked out lights attracted bugs.

But one night he discovered that one of the little beasts had bitten off far more than it could chew. James, 29, said: ‘A bug landed on the bulb and when the frog went for it he got a little bit extra.

‘I zoomed in and noticed that the wire was actually going into the frogs mouth, he had swallowed the entire light, he wasn’t sitting on it at all’

‘I have a large mango tree by my patio and my wife and I have Christmas lights wrapped around the trunk and main limbs to light it up from underneath.

Because the wire was still attached to the light, Snyder was able to pull it gently from the frog’s mouth.

Read more: Daily Mail (UK)

Kirtland Peterson

Bird-eating frog among 163 new species found in Mekong region

A frog that eats birds and a gecko with leopard stripes are among the 163 new species discovered last year in the Greater Mekong region of southeast Asia, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund.

The discovery of 100 new plants, 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and one bird species highlights the extent of the biodiversity in the region, said Barney Long, head of the WWF’s Asian Species Conservation program.

“It’s a melting pot of diverse habitats. It has some of the wettest forests on the planet, high mountains, and a diverse array of terrestrial and marine habitats, including the Mekong River,” he said.

Full story: CNN

Kirtland Peterson

Huachansu, a Chinese medicine that comes from the dried venom secreted by the skin glands of toads, has tolerable toxicity levels, even at doses eight times those normally administered, and may slow disease progression in some cancer patients, say researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The results from the Phase I clinical study, a collaborative research project between M. D. Anderson and Fudan University Cancer Hospital in Shanghai, are reported in the online Early View feature of the journal Cancer. The study marks the first time a formal clinical trial has examined the relationship between huachansu dose and toxicity, although the drug is common in China and approved by the Chinese Food and Drug Administration.

Huachansu is widely used to treat patients with liver, lung, colon and pancreatic cancer at oncology clinics in China. Chinese clinical trials conducted since the 1970s have demonstrated the anti-cancer properties of huachansu, citing total response rates of 10 percent and 16 percent observed in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma and lung cancer, respectively1,2.

“Studying traditional Chinese medicine such as huachansu is new to American research institutions, which have been skeptical and slow to adopt these complementary treatments. However, it is important to understand its potential role in treating cancer,” says Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D., one of the paper’s authors and director of the Integrative Medicine Program at M. D. Anderson. “We wanted to apply a Western medicine-based approach to explore the role of the toad venom compound in cancer patients and test if it is possible to deliver a more potent dose without raising toxicities or side effects.”

Read more: SciencDaily

Kirtland Peterson

“Frogs are nice, gentle creatures, and you are powerful and you have the right and responsibility to look after them properly.”

Xenpus laevis, commonly known as the African clawed frog, has been used to study topics as diverse as development, neuroscience, and cloning.  However, their treatment in research labs has not always been on par with their valuable contributions.  Dr. Hazel Sive, the Associate Dean of the School of Science and Professor of Biology at MIT, has a long history of working with Xenopus and early in her career, spearheaded a movement toward more humane treatment of these slippery model organisms.

Sive first encountered the African clawed frog while doing undergraduate research in South Africa, where she was raised.  She returned to frogs for her postdoctoral work in the lab of Dr. Harold Weintraub at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington.  It was there that she began to notice differences between the ways frogs were kept and treated in South Africa and the US.

In South Africa, where Xenopus are native, they can be harvested from the wild and mate spontaneously, after which eggs can be collected for use in research.  However, in the US they are not found in the wild and must instead be injected with hormones which cause them to lay eggs.

Read more at The Graduate, MIT

Kirtland Peterson

The first genetic link in the evolution of the heart from three-chambered to four-chambered has been found, illuminating part of the puzzle of how birds and mammals became warm-blooded.

Frogs have a three-chambered heart. It consists of two atria and one ventricle. As the right side of a frog’s heart receives deoxygenated blood from the body, and the left side receives freshly oxygenated blood from the lungs, the two streams of blood mix together in the ventricle, sending out a concoction that is not fully oxygenated to the rest of the frog’s body.

Turtles are a curious transition–they still have three chambers, but a wall, or septum is beginning to form in the single ventricle. This change affords the turtle’s body blood that is slightly richer in oxygen than the frog’s.

Birds and mammals, however, have a fully septated ventricle–a bona fide four-chambered heart. This configuration ensures the separation of low-pressure circulation to the lungs, and high-pressure pumping into the rest of the body.

More, including interview at National Science Foundation

Kirtland Peterson

Sometimes to see something properly, you have to stand farther back. This is true of Chuck Close portraits where a patchwork of many small faces changes into one giant face as you back away.

It may also be true of the frogs of Central America, where the pattern of extinctions emerges clearly only at a certain spatial scale.

Everyone knows that frogs are in trouble and that some species have disappeared, but a recent analysis of Central American frog surveys shows the situation is worse than had been thought.

Under pressure from a fungal disease, the frogs in this biodiversity hot spot are undergoing “a vast homogenization” that is leaving behind impoverished communities that increasingly resemble one another.

“We’re witnessing the McDonaldization of the frog communities,” says Kevin G. Smith, Ph.D., associate director of the Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read more: Washington University in St. Louis

Kirtland Peterson

Current research by museum herpetologists has found surprising numbers of frogs in areas ravaged by the February 2009 Victorian bushfires.

It seems extraordinary that any frogs remain here given the widespread habitat loss caused by the fires. “The frogs probably survived by sheltering in the dams or in vegetation around the edges,” said Bec Bray, a research assistant working with Curator of Herpetology Jane Melville on this project. “We even got a recapture from last year at the most heavily-burned site at Toolangi.”

The museum holds frog field data for the wider Kinglake area that was collected 40 years ago by Murray Littlejohn. The ten field sites central to the current study have been monitored by PhD candidate Katie Smith for the past three years. Combining the early data with more recent results provides a detailed picture of frog populations before the bushfires. Five species – Crinia parinsignifera, Crinia signifera, Litoria ewingi, Litoria paraewingi and Litoria verreauxi – have been recorded historically at the ten field sites, and all five have been observed after the fires.

Full story at Museum Victoria

Kirtland Peterson

Ready to grill dinner recently for himself and his wife, Fred DeNegri, 55, popped a can of Diet Pepsi to sip while he cooked. But one swig of the cola was enough to put him off his meal.

“At the time, I asked him and he couldn’t even describe [the taste],” said Fred’s wife, Amy DeNegri, 54, of Ormond Beach, Fla. “He said, ‘I’ve never tasted anything so awful in my life.’”

Dumping the liquid, the couple said, they discovered a small animal macerating in the can. Testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed that the animal was either a frog or a toad, although the agency found no connection to the Pepsi plant where the soda was bottled.

“I would have been throwing up,” Amy DeNegri said, if she had been the one drinking the soda.

While the DeNegri’s amphibian-infused soda sounds like the stuff of urban legends, in reality, such transgressions can occur. And while these incidents may not occur often or pose significant health risks, the ick factor can be through the roof.

Full story at ABC News and Boy’s Life

Kirtland Peterson

The male Kuranda tree frog (pictured) is one slick amphibian: It has a distinctive tapping call that scientists have dubbed fast talk.

Discovered in tropical Queensland state in eastern Australia, the frog is among at least 1,300 new plant and animal species found in the country since 1999, according to a new report by the conservation group WWF-Australia (Australia map.) Listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the frog hops through a habitat of just 1.3 square miles (3.5 square kilometers). Its fast talking quickly devolves into aggressive wrestling matches with competitors, according to the report, released to mark Australia’s National Threatened Species Day on September 7.

“The extent of Australia’s rich biodiversity is astounding, to the point where science is regularly being used to describe new species,” Michael Roache of WWF-Australia said in a statement.

Over the last ten years in Australia, scientists have unearthed an average of at least two new species a week, he added.

Fabulous National Geographic pix

Kirtland Peterson

Introduced by the state government as wild game for sportsmen, bullfrogs have made Arizona their new home on the range.

With no natural predators and plenty to eat, the bullfrogs are taking over. With a mouth as big as the great outdoors, Wild Chronicles follow conservationists’ fears that these big bullies may be devouring native species.

Can they be stopped?

Watch video at: Metacafe

Kirtland Peterson

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.

Full story: The Guardian (UK)

Kirtland Peterson