THE OBSERVER (Agassiz, British Columbia) 10 October 07 Endangered frogs given second chance (Monique Tamminga)
Dressed in gumboots and slickers, Andrea Gielens and her team of volunteers and staff are up to their elbows in muddy, boggy water, digging around for hundreds of slippery little members of an endangered species.
Inside the Langley Mountainview Conservation and Breeding Centre, the group caught counted, weighed, measured and injected florescent pink liquid plastic into at least 1,500 Oregon spotted frogs.
“We are catching the fruits of Andrea’s labour,” said retired Mountainview animal keeper Debbie Rempel, who volunteered her time to count the frogs.
The four to eight-centimetre amphibians were the first species to be emergency listed on Canada’s endangered list in 2000, said Gielens.
“It takes around six hours to tag 200 frogs. It’s a delicate process,” she said.
“We inject the liquid in between their toes on the back feet. That way we can identify them in the wild.”
This beats the tiny backpacks they put on the frogs a couple years ago, she said. With only 54 breeding pairs left in Canada, the work taking place at Mountainview to save the spotted frog is so important that both federal and provincial governments have got on board.
“There are not a lot of wetland species left so we are losing our biodiversity. We are losing our special species,” she said.
She’s ready to release these frogs back to their native Seabird Island marshlands in Agassiz where, as egg masses, they were taken to Mountainview in May to be reared in captivity.
In total, 480 eggs were divided into 300 gallon tubs that the group were fishing the frogs out of this week. The tadpoles were fed kale that has been cooked and pureed. When they turned into frogs in August they were fed pinhead crickets, she said.
There are only two populations left of the spotted frog in Canada. One is in marshlands at Seabird Island and the other is at the Department of National Defence base in Aldergrove on 264 Street. Despite the small population in Aldergrove, she doesn’t want to release any of these new frogs to the defence base, because all these reared frogs came from Agassiz.
“We don’t won’t to mix genetics that’s why they go back to the habitat they came from,” she said.
The Oregon spotted frog, which once occupied wetland habitat throughout the lower Fraser River valley, has declined rapidly due to loss of large wetlands, predation from bullfrogs and because of the degradation caused from invasive reed canary grass.
“A bullfrog can eat a rat compared to the poor spotted frog which is purely aquatic so it doesn’t have an escape route from these much larger, hungry bullfrogs,” she said.
Sadly this year, Gielens found no new egg masses at the Aldergrove defence base.
“It’s probably due to the flooding. With how cold it’s been, they may have delayed [laying the eggs],” she said. She’ll continue to go back to see if any egg masses are there.
Gielens hopes for better numbers this year and believes the release of these mature frogs will help in the survival rate in Agassiz.
This program involves the federal and provincial government, the local community, the Seabird Island Band and a private conservation centre.
Both Seabird Island and the defence base are highly protected, so these frogs have a better chance.
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