LANGLEY TIMES (British Columbia) 08 August 03 A renewed lease on life (Brenda Anderson)
Canada's most endangered amphibian is getting a jump start on recovery at a Langley wildlife refuge that specializes in bringing threatened species back from the brink.
The "critically imperiled" Oregon spotted frog is the subject of an in-depth project being carried out, in part, at Fort Langley's Mountain View Conservation and Breeding Centre to try to increase the animals' dwindling numbers.
"Gordon (Blankstein, owner of Mountain View Conservation Farm) contacted us about two years ago and asked to become involved," said Russ Haycock, co-chair of the spotted frog recovery project.
At that point, the project was still in early stages at the Greater Vancouver Zoo, where biologists were working to determine the optimum population density to hatch and raise the frogs.
"We asked Gordon to wait a year while we figured out how to do this," said Haycock.
This spring, 800 eggs were deposited into six 300-gallon tubs at Mountain View, to be hatched, raised until they are past the greatest danger of predation and then released back into the wild.
Another 800 are being raised at the Greater Vancouver Zoo in Aldergrove, with one more tank at the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park.
Over the past four months, the eggs have hatched into tadpoles and developed into froglets, ready for release back into the wetlands at the Canadian naval radio site in Aldergrove, where the eggs were gathered.
At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, the recovery project team began preparing the young frogs. Weighing roughly the equivalent of a dime, and with bodies the length of a finger tip, the creatures were measured, and tagged before being returned to the shallow marshland.
Haycock, a biologist and consultant who specializes in amphibians, was impressed by the project's success - an estimated 70 per cent survival rate.
"Mountain View) Farm has done incredibly well in terms of the numbers they've been able to raise," he said, as he injected alphanumeric codes underneath the skin of the frogs' thighs. The tiny numbers, which are visible under blue light when the viewer wears amber-coloured glasses, will be used to identify each frog two years from now, when the biologists expect to collect them.
Oregon spotted frogs reach sexual maturity at about two years old, then congregate to mate and lay eggs. It's a practice Haycock believes will make it relatively easy for him and his team to recapture the frogs and take new measurements.
He's counting on a few wild-hatched frogs to wander into his traps as well, so that he will be able to compare the frogs' growth and gauge the success of the team's methods.
Throughout the life of the project, they will continue to update a husbandry manual outlining successful methodology for scientists to come.
"So everything we've learned from what Debbie (Rempel, a vet tech and employee of Mountain View Farm) has been doing . . . we can update in that manual."
Rempel joined the project on April 1, when she helped the team collect egg masses in Aldergrove. She prepared the tubs to closely resemble the amphibians' natural habitat and monitored the eggs until they hatched, fed pureed spinach to the tadpoles and switched the menu to crickets when they developed into tiny frogs about three weeks ago.
She also took care to scoop as many predacious beetles as possible from the tubs.
"That's probably where most of our mortalities came from," said Rempel.
But it's not necessarily a bad thing. While the frogs are "hardwired" to sense many dangers, "they still need to learn to look out and be nervous," she added.
Rempel, who has laughingly dubbed herself "the frog princess," is no stranger to the pressures of having a species depend on her for its very survival.
"I do feel a ton of responsibility," she admitted.
Rempel has been working for the past two years with North America's most endangered mammals, Vancouver Island marmots.
Adding the care of the Oregon spotted frogs to her duties has increased Rempel's workload and cut in to her down time as well. But she wouldn't have it any other way.
"Coming in on days off and staying up to midnight is a small price to pay to have a species survive. Their lives are directly in your hands," she said.
"You realize just how precious they are, and we (humans) are responsible for their lack of habitat."
Native to the Fraser Valley and the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the Oregon spotted frog was first identified in 1997 as a separate species from the Columbia spotted frog (which is not threatened) and was declared an endangered species by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) in 1999.
Only three populations of the frogs exist in the B.C. wild, explained Russ Haycock, a biologist and co-chair of the Oregon spotted frog recovery project.
One is in the Canadian Forces naval radio site in Aldergrove; the other two are located in wetlands near Agassiz.
An estimate on a B.C. government Web site places the population of Oregon spotted frogs in the province at just 300.
Lack of a specialized habitat is the main threat to the species, explained Haycock.
The reason is that much of the shallow, permanent wetlands favoured by the Oregon spotted frog has been filled in, largely for agriculture.
"Farmland is the smoking gun in the Lower Mainland," he said.
"But the damage is done, no one's blaming farmers."
Under COSEWIC and the federal Endangered Species Risk Act, the team is required to put in place a recovery plan, including a set of objectives for managing and increasing habitat for the frogs.
To that end, a $130,000 habitat rehabilitation program is set to begin on the Aldergrove site within the next couple of weeks, with the restoration of two hectares (five acres) of shallow, permanent wetland on the base, Haycock explained.
"We hope the phrase, 'if you build it they will come,' applies."
A renewed lease on life