Long Beach<\/a> are working to change that math, one tadpole at a time.<\/p>\nIn the latest release, about 653 of the critically endangered frogs were returned to their native mountain habitat by staff from the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Los Angeles Zoo and the U.S. Geological Survey. Of those, 394 had been head-started at the aquarium \u2014 its largest release of the species yet, bringing its total to 1,032.<\/p>\n
The frogs were bred at the Los Angeles Zoo\u2019s breeding program, then transferred to Long Beach as tadpoles, where aquarium staff reared them through metamorphosis into froglets and frogs. The process typically takes one to two years, though the species can remain in its tadpole stage for up to five years, making a given frog\u2019s age something of a mystery even to the people who raised it.<\/p>\n
Inside the aquarium, the water is engineered to mimic the mountains it\u2019s standing in \u2014 kept near 60 degrees in summer, the temperature currently found in the streams the frogs call home, and cooled to around 52 degrees in winter, with reduced UV exposure to simulate the season\u2019s shorter, dimmer days.<\/p>\n
The aquarium\u2019s involvement began in 2021, in the aftermath of the 2020 Bobcat fire, which tore through the central San Gabriel Mountains and destroyed an estimated 95% of the frog\u2019s remaining usable habitat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had salvaged some tadpoles from the fire-impacted areas, and they ended up bringing a handful of them here,\u201d said Erin Lundy, with the aquarium\u2019s conservation team. \u201cAnd then we also had some captive-bred ones from the L.A. Zoo that year, and that was our first group.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since then, the team has expanded to include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which help monitor populations and oversee releases.<\/p>\n
As the aquarium\u2019s tadpole numbers have grown, some are now sent to the Santa Ana Zoo each October to continue growing until they\u2019re ready for reintroduction. Frogs are carefully separated by genetics and population of origin, so each can be released back into its native range and preserve healthy genetic lines.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that we have some responsibility to give the animals the best chance that they could possibly have,\u201d Lundy said, \u201cbut this is certainly a species that without a good amount of human intervention would not exist to this day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of the aquarium\u2019s work is now focused on an even more elusive threat than fire: chytrid fungus, a microscopic pathogen that attacks the keratin in amphibian skin, blocking the salt absorption frogs rely on and eventually causing cardiac arrest. It has driven amphibian populations to collapse worldwide, and mountain yellow-legged frogs appear especially vulnerable to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome amphibian species over time have developed a resistance to chytrid, and so part of the intention of growing so many animals is hoping to find what gene that is that introduces some chytrid resistance,\u201d Lundy said. Researchers are testing whether frogs can be inoculated before release, or whether introducing different microbes to their skin might help them fend off the fungus on their own.<\/p>\n
Lundy has now been on three of the aquarium\u2019s release trips, watching frogs she has cared for \u2014 some for years \u2014 carried up into the mountains and set loose into the streams they were bred to repopulate. It is, she says, a strange kind of joy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little bittersweet because, oh no, I\u2019ve been taking care of you for so long, but that is the point, so it feels a little bit like Christmas Day,\u201d Lundy said.<\/p>\n
Not every frog leaves the same way. Some, she said, shoot off into the current without so much as a pause. Others linger at the water\u2019s edge beside her for a few minutes before finally disappearing beneath the surface.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlmost feels like they\u2019re saying goodbye,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
This story was originally published by the Long Beach Post and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-471731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}