Last week, Oregon spotted frog tadpoles and metamorphs were introduced to the wetland built specifically for them in the Fraser River floodplain! Hopefully, over the next few years, this population will succeed, breed, and provide another little pocket of OSF in the Valley.
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| Releasing juvenile frogs into the wetland! (Amanda Kissel photo) |
Tomorrow (Saturday April 30), we'll be finishing up the aquatics planting portion of the wetland construction, and we're looking for volunteers. If you're interested in getting wet and muddy, send me a message. The project is outside of Agassiz, BC, and starts at 10 am on Saturday. Chest waders will be provided, but bring your own rubber boots and work gloves if you have them. We may even encounter an Oregon spotted frog or two.
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| Oregon spotted frog egg mass cluster |
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OSF hatched tadpoles
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| Life as an OSF tadpole. |
In more good news, frog numbers are up this year. Each year in the spring we slog through wetlands to count egg masses - eggs don't hide, and stay still for you to count them. Each egg mass indicates one breeding female, and gives us a good sense of breeding success in that year. Numbers have been declining fairly steadily for the last 10 years, so it's nice to see an upswing. However, it's unclear whether the larger numbers are due to a couple of easy winters, a late spring, or increased search effort. We'll need to tease that out over the next little while by comparing the details of different breeding sites, gps tracking logs of observers, and climate patterns over the last 10 years.
Apologies for the ridiculous photo placements - blogger is messing with me.
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