THE EXAMINER (Denver, Colorado) 25 November 06 Prospects increasing for helping threatened frogs' survival (Arthur H. Rotstein)
Tucson, Ariz. (AP): Survival prospects could leap upward for the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog - if such mortal threats as bullfrogs and fungal disease can be dealt with.
The green critters speckled with black dots, native to portions of Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico, have dwindled greatly in population and habitat because of factors ranging from nonnative predators to disease, drought and habitat destruction - essentially ranches being broken up for development.
But since 2000, even before the frogs' 2002 listing as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, federal and state wildlife agencies have been developing a plan to get ranchers and other private landowners to help protect them through so-called safe harbor agreements.
"It's really a win-win sort of situation, because it benefits wildlife, it benefits the private landowners, scientists, the general public and wildlife managers," said Valerie Boyarski, amphibians and reptiles conservation planner for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. "It provides protection against regulatory repercussions when dealing with threatened species that might be on their property."
"If a landowner enters into agreement with us, it buys the landowner's cooperation in restoring or making habitat available for the species, even if it's of short term," said Jeff Humphrey, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman.
"And in return, the landowner gets to have the assurance that if in the future he has to return to a baseline situation, free of any frogs, he doesn't face any liability."
The safe harbor agreement program, in the planning stages for several years and officially signed statewide in late September, is expected to start in earnest in 2007.
Some new leopard frog populations were established this year, using tadpoles reared at the Phoenix Zoo, at suitable locations near Young on the Tonto National Forest and in the Dragoon Mountains on the Coronado National Forest, said Jim Rorabaugh, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist heading leopard frog recovery efforts.
Marty Tuegle, another Fish and Wildlife official, said the agency is putting together guidelines for implementing the safe harbor program and how to assess various landowners who come forth. "One of the issues is not providing avenues for bullfrogs," he said.
"You start modeling and mapping where you have bullfrogs and where you have leopard frogs. We don't want to throw a bunch of Chiricahua leopard frogs in an area where they're just going to become food for bullfrogs.
"We want to make sure we're concentrating our efforts where we're going to get the most conservation for the time and effort."
Tuegle expects five to 10 landowners to participate in the first year. Rancher Ross Humphreys said he thinks dozens will be helping out once the agreement program settles in.
The Malpai Borderlands Group, an organization of ranchers in far southeastern Arizona dedicated to making ranching and environmental preservation compatible, already has signed an agreement, as has one of its founding families - Anna and Matt Magoffin.
They have helped keep the troubled frogs alive for close to a dozen years, Anna Magoffin said.
"There were some scientists doing a survey on the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge (also east of Douglas), and they told my husband they'd lost the Chiricahua leopard frogs at one of their ponds," Anna Magoffin said.
When her husband told them that they had some of the same frogs in a livestock pond, she said, "They didn't believe we had any, because they didn't have any records" of the amphibians on the Magoffins' ranch.
Magoffin said she and her husband hauled water to their own 50-foot-wide pond to keep the frogs alive during times of drought, then eventually worked with the Malpai group and Arizona Game and Fish to put in a concrete-lined pond about as big as a queen-sized bed, and a pipeline.
And with approval of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they moved some frogs from the natural pond when it started drying out.
They built another small pond last year to add more frogs, she said.
Until now, she said, "the laws to protect the endangered or threatened species also tend to keep anyone but federal agencies from being able to populate the species," Magoffin said. "It wasn't legal to take tadpoles from the pond and move them anywhere because that would have been threatening an endangered species."
With the safe harbor agreement, "individuals will be able to work toward restoring the population," she said.
Like Anna Magoffin, Ross Humphreys, who owns ranches in the San Rafael Valley near the Mexican border in Santa Cruz County and near Three Points in Pima County, is a member of the Chiricahua leopard frog recovery team. He has had a population of leopard frogs in a stock tank, and on another ranch he's building four new water habitats that will be closed off from cows and deer to benefit endangered Sonoran tiger salamanders and, he hopes, leopard frogs.
"I think that there's a place where wildlife and agriculture can join, and I have a very explicit strategy of taking care of wildlife," Humphreys said.
Historically, the Chiricahua leopard frog's range took in much of eastern and central Arizona below the Mogollon Rim, as well as southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and a handful of locations in the northern Mexico states of Sonora and Chihuahua.
But predators such as bullfrogs, crayfish and nonnative fish - from largemouth bass and introduced trout to crayfish - along with chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease, are posing the most significant threats to the leopard frog, state and federal biologists say.
Fish and Wildlife's Rorabaugh estimates that there about 32 separate colonies of the frogs, primarily small populations in stock tanks, in Arizona. About a decade ago, there were more than double the colonies.
Chytrid fungus, a skin disease contagious among amphibians, is global in scope, Rorabaugh said. "It's killing frogs and toads around the planet," he said. "It is a problem in Arizona. It's hard to say how much of a problem it's been.
"But a lot of populations disappeared in the late '70s, early '80s, at a time when the disease was fairly novel in Arizona. And by the time biologists were getting out on the landscape and looking for these things, they were probably gone."
Those involved in the frog-saving efforts say they're encouraged and optimistic, and that the safe harbor agreements will provide an impetus. "It's going to help other species as well," Magoffin said. "Once other private landowners see that it's a good idea, I think that it'll help a lot of other species."
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