Releasing a green and golden bell frog back in the wild – Credit: University of Canberra
This beautiful amphibian is being reintroduced to wetlands around Australia’s capital of Canberra after suffering a population collapse due to chytrid fungus.
Called the green and golden bell frog, these animals were bred in captivity and will be released in groups of 15 into ponds and wetlands having been immunized against a disease caused by the fungus.
They will also be let free in areas where “frog saunas” have been built—basically piles of black bricks covered in a pyramid of rigid plastic sheets. The slots and holes in the bricks are perfect for the frogs to shelter in, and at toasty temperatures lethal to the chytrid fungus.
Chytrid has been responsible for extinctions and population collapses all over the world, and scientists are only just now getting a handle on how to protect amphibians from it.
The green and golden bell frogs have mercifully been spared from such a fate, and scientists working at the University of Canberra to restore them to the wild felt the reintroduction has been a little like watching your children move out of the house for the first time.
Associate Professor Simon Clulow said it was “quite incredible,” for “as far as we’re aware, it went extinct [in the ACT] by about 1981.”
ACT stands for Australian Capital Territory, the special administrative zone around Canberra.
180 of the frog saunas have been installed around the ponds where over 300 captive-bred frogs will be released. Each female can produce around 8,000 eggs in a single mating season, so while the population is predicted to proliferate rapidly, the offspring will not be immune to the chytrid. For them, the saunas should help.
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“The pathogen itself is quite susceptible to elevated temperature—it doesn’t like temperatures over 25C; 27 or 28C is quite lethal to it,” Clulow told the Guardian. “A lot of Australian frogs … prefer those temperatures—the green and golden bell frog likes to be about 30C.”
30°C is around 88° Fahrenheit. Outside the ACT, the frogs have clung on in isolated pools where the water contains a little salinity, and these have also been picked out in the ACT as the ideal relocation sites—and named ‘frog spas,’ for their warm, slightly saline water and sauna compliment.
The goal is to quickly reach around 200 of these frogs at each of the 15 ponds.
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