Cameroon clawed frog

Transcription

♪ (light electronic music) ♪ (Brian Freiermuth) People don't have much of an appreciation for them. Not in a negative way, but in fact, people simply don't realize that there are amphibians everywhere, right? That even in San Francisco, there's salamanders that probably live in your backyard. And so, they really are everywhere. Frogs are in trouble for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is habitat destruction, which is actually one of things that affects most groups of animals. But frogs, in recent years, have declined greatly due to disease. The amphibian Chytrid Fungus has wiped out numerous populations of a variety of different species. (Bart Shepherd) Xenopus longipes, the Lake Oku clawed frogs, actually come from a single crater lake in Cameroon and they only occur there and it's a very tiny little lake. Nothing is known about them. We wanted to collect these frogs because there is so much that we can learn about them by keeping them in a controlled environment. We are trying to breed them to learn about their biology, their life history, the reproductive cycle of these frogs, how long they stay in a tadpole phase, what does the tadpole phase eat — there are a great many things that we can learn in the aquaria that we can't learn out with field observations. (Brian Freiermuth) Bringing the frogs back from Cameroon was a little bit of a challenge because you have to keep these frogs pretty cool. They live in a high elevation lake and the temperature in that lake is about 65 degrees. We had to keep them cool in coolers, bring them down from the highlands through the lowlands where it's very, very hot. (Dave Blackburn) We had a partnership with an airline that enabled us to bring them back alive in the cabin of the plane, coming back to the U.S. We didn't know how to pay for 50 frog tickets. That would have been hard. (Nicole Chaney) When they came back to the academy, they immediately went into our quarantine facility, so they were there for at least 30 days, but it turns out, they stayed in a little bit longer. because we had to do a lot of disease screening. (Dave Blackburn) One of the things that we spent many months on was actually making sure that these individual frogs were cleared of the fungus by treating them with a fungicide so that they could be integrated into the rest of our living collections. (Nicole Chaney) We have been successful in breeding them in captivity which has been amazing. We keep them in conditions similar to the lake and they've done very, very well. Many zoos and aquaria have captive populations that they are breeding as assurance populations, so that if the species goes extinct in the wild, they is some group of animals that can be used to reseed those wild populations. One of the values of doing this work here at the academy is not only to put them on the public floor, let people learn about these frogs and conservation challenges for frogs in general, but anything we learn there can be really important for actually designing conservation management plans for conserving them in the wild, in the field at the only lake where they are known to occur.