Archives for 2016

Inspired by Nature: Dyke’s Side

May 10, 2016 by admin

^{Inspired by Nature is a themed Croak to entertain you with art and creative writing based on nature and the outdoors. We hope it will stimulate you to get creative and produce something yourself. If you do and would like to share them with us, please post them on our Facebook page, Twitter account, or email us at info@froglife.org}

^{This months feature has been written by Rebecca Neal our Conservation Youth Worker on the Peterborough Green Pathways project, funded by BBC Children in Need.}

I love the poet John Clare. Not only does he make my region famous (his home was only a few miles from the Froglife office), but he also wrote a lot about the outdoors. He was inspired by a landscape that still looks similar to what I see on my weekend strolls in the fens.

I came across this fantastic poem by Clare when searching for inspiration for this column. It’s a sonnet, which mean it is written in iambic pentameter (ten syllables with a stress on alternate words: de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum) and has fourteen lines. It has a non-traditional rhyming scheme for a sonnet whereby pairs of lines rhyme at the end, called “rhyming couplets”. Shakespeare and other famous sonnet writers used a more complex rhyming pattern.

Dyke’s Side

The frog croaks loud and maidens dare not pass

But fear the noisome toad and shun the grass:

And on the sunny banks they dare not go

Where hissing snakes run to the floods below.

The nuthatch noises loud in wood and wild,

Like women turning skreeking to a child.

The schoolboy hears and brushes through the trees

And runs about till drabbled to the knees.

The old hawk winnows round the old crow’s nest:

The schoolboy hears and wonder fills his breast.

He throws his basket down to climb the tree

And wonders what the red blotched eggs can be:

The green woodpecker bounces from the view

And hollos as he buzzes by “kew kew”

John Clare 1793-1864 © Eric Robinson (2016)

I love the fact that this poem has frogs, toads and snakes in it (perhaps I am biased!), and talks about the interaction between nature and people. This loss of this interaction is what Froglife’s education work is trying to address. Even when the interaction is one of fear, at least there is a connection. I also love the language; noisome is a great word, I am now going to try to use more often in everyday conversations! Here is the definitions of some of the more archaic words:

Drabbled: become wet and dirty by movement through muddy water

Skreeking: a high-pitched screeching noise

Winnow: to fan or beat the air with wings

I was inspired by these words to write a short story for my creative writing evening class with as many strange sounding old words as I could fit in. If you are also inspired by John Clare and want to share what you write, please get in touch.

Froglife Announce New Patron

May 5, 2016 by admin

Jules Howard, Froglife's new Patron — Jules Howard, Froglife’s new Patron

UK amphibian and reptile conservation charity, Froglife, are delighted to announce that Jules Howard will be joining TV presenter Mike Dilger as their new Patron.

Jules is a zoologist, international non-fiction author and regular writer for The Guardian and BBC Wildlife Magazine. A former Froglifer, Jules has a genuine soft spot for frogs, toads and snakes and has fond memories of his years on Froglife’s enquiry line, particularly during spring-time.

“For me, amphibians and reptiles are mysterious, weird and not altogether… normal. This is why I love them. And they’re also so accessible. Anyone, regardless of their demographic in life, can be engaged by frogs. Through them, anyone can be sparked off into a lasting interest in science and nature. This was certainly the case for me.”

As well as writing and presenting, Jules is also a UK Science Ambassador. In the last five years, Jules has worked with 100,000 pupils, encouraging careers in science including palaeontology, zoology and wildlife conservation. Jules also presents at (and hosts for) a number of science festivals, including Edinburgh International Science Festival, Cheltenham Science Festival, TEDx and IDEAcity Toronto.

“Froglife’s strength is in its unique perspective. Wildlife conservation is mostly about saving wild places. But we, I guess, need saving a bit too. Our lives can be made better through nature. Froglife gets that. Being a Patron, having worked at Froglife, is a real honour and a privilege. I’m delighted to be involved.”

Froglife takes a holistic approach to nature conservation which enables them to take individuals on a wildlife journey, whilst also delivering amazing results for amphibian and reptile species. In the last two years Froglife has created or restored 270 wildlife sites, with help from 1,891 volunteers and benefitting 12,543 people.

Froglife’s CEO Kathy Wormald said “We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Jules as our new Patron alongside Mike Dilger. As a former employee Jules knows the organisation from the inside out and has shown a long-term commitment to our organisation and the species we work to protect. We are delighted to honour him in this way and know that he will act as a fantastic ambassador for Froglife”.

Jules Howard on Toad Migration

March 22, 2016 by admin

(author Death on Earth published by Bloomsbury and former Froglifer)

The spring toad migration is one of my favourite times of the year. I generally like any animal you can pick up, intensely eyeball and probe, and put down without it being in the least bit bothered and, for me, this totally encapsulates what toads are like. With its dry, almost scaly skin, orange eyes and a slow waddling crawl, it has almost been designed via natural selection to fit perfectly into the coat pocket of an 11-year-old boy or girl. Toads are such resilient little things. Tough-skinned, rugged stanced. No wonder they are rooted so deeply within the fossil record.

But toads are not so resilient that they can withstand getting hit by a modern human invention like, say, a car. If they get hit by a car they are not resilient at all. They simply die. Or they twitch their limbs in assumed agony for a little while and then die. Many of Britain’s roads are littered with their corpses each spring. The TV quiz show QI (and I have no idea where they got this fact) says that 20 tonnes of toads are killed on Britain’s roads each year, which is nothing if not incredible. But it’s no surprise to me. There are a lot of European common toads out there and you could say that evolutionarily speaking the toads bet on the wrong horse: they went for poisonous skin and stamina over the speed and wariness that frogs, generally, possess. In a world of human vehicles they chose … well …20 tonnes? That says it all.

Rescuing toads from roads is one of those activities that you’ll normally find a friend of a friend does. Normally that friend of a friend is: a) eccentric; b) kind and loving, perhaps overly so; or c) having marital difficulties and needs an excuse to leave the house. Most toad patrollers are any combination of these three things. In temperate climates, on the whole, amphibian migrations take place during runs of consecutive warm, wet nights (particularly after or during rain), often in early spring. To see them yourself at this time of year, look at a Google map and pick out local reservoirs, lakes and big ponds. After dark, travel slowly and safely on roads near these freshwater spots and you will probably see them trundling along, particularly on more humid nights.

Toads are more picky about their breeding ponds than frogs. Whereas in northern Europe frogs prefer shallower ponds, toads appear to prefer bigger, deeper bodies of water. But such breeding spots are rarer than small ponds and this is a further source of bad news to toads: they must travel further to get where they need to go than frogs, navigating more and more obstacles, like roads and housing estates, in the process. Some populations of toads have been doing fi ne, it seems. Others – where roads are busier, for instance – are less fi ne. In Britain, with more and more roads, our toad populations are facing death by a thousand cuts; they’re declining so slightly in so many places for so many reasons that barely anyone has noticed or is able to do much about it.

Each year during toad season there are five ponds that I normally visit, keeping tabs on how local populations are doing. Why do I do this? I’m not sure. It’s partly out of duty, but also because I like to see and pick up toads and this is the only time of year I can really do it. It ’ s exhilarating in some ways, driving down small roads, looking for tell-tale shapes like dead leaves that move slowly in front of my beams.

I pull up to my first site. It’s a small B-road near Great Brington on the western edge of Northampton. The toads here like to breed in the moat-like pond that surrounds Princess Diana’s burial site, which is quite a nice thought (I think it’s what she would have wanted). In many ways the site is typical: on one side of the road is a hill upon which a woodland sits in the distance, and down there, on the other side of the road and over a large brick wall, is where the large pond lies. Toads wake up from their winter slumber in the woodland and, en masse, make a move down to the water, crossing fields, hedgerows, a small ditch, and now this road. I think they must find little holes in the wall to squeeze through, but I have never actually seen them do this.

There are plenty of toads about tonight. Fifteen are already dead on the road. A large female has had her head squashed by a car and her unfertilised spawn has fi red out of her rear end. This is particularly sad because female toads take more than three years to mature – as a result, to a meta-population, the life of each female really does count because it is capable of restocking tadpole numbers with such vigour. But not her. And not here. Most years I don’t think much about all the death – they are casualties, and I’m here to try and help the living toads – but this year things feel slightly different. This year, the dead ones are as interesting to me as the live ones. I shine my torch on each one, assessing their size, their sex and their missed potential. My interest in death is changing me.

Toad crossings are always much sparser than you might imagine them to be. The toads move so slowly, they look more like an army of the undead crossing a graveyard than a sweaty tangled sexed-up throng like they appear on TV documentaries. But it is the number of them that keep coming that makes it all so impressive. For hours and hours, night after night, they keep coming from that woodland, heading over the road to the pond. By helping so many cross, by counting up the living and the dead, one gets a real feel for the statistical likelihood of survival, and, almost, the whole energetics of toad populations and what they bring to an ecosystem. You get a really good feeling that each life and each death matters for something. And also one gets a feeling for what death brings, in particular.

9781472915078

Croaking Science: Can treatment in the field save frogs?

March 22, 2016 by admin

Amphibian disease- Can anti-fungal treatment in the field save frogs during a disease epidemic?

Significant research focus has been dedicated recently to amphibian diseases and yet, despite a much better understanding of the mechanisms of infection, the genetics of the pathogens and the impacts on the populations of various species, we are still some distance away from finding a solution that can be applied more widely to groups of species in order to rescue them in the wild and to be able to maintain their populations in the face of disease epidemics caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). An estimated 200 amphibian species are at risk of extinction due to this fungus worldwide making this an extremely urgent situation. The current proposed scenario of captive breeding and collections of some of the most threatened amphibian species remains only a crisis and short-term solution with so far little realistic prospect of releases back into the wild on a large scale. Even more, as revealed in a previous Croaking science article, zoos are currently failing to prioritise amphibian species that are likely to require captive breeding programmes to prevent their extinction and amphibians remain a comparatively low priority for most zoo conservation programmes.

Figure 1: Mountain Chicken Frog (Photo Credit: Josh More)

A treatment in the wild remains elusive and so far the few success stories such as the eradication of chytrid infection from the island of Mallorca (Bosch et al. 2015) would be immensely difficult to apply more widely and certainly in the complex high-altitude tropical forest where many of the critically endangered amphibians live. Anti-fungal solutions, especially itraconazole, have proved effective at treatments for chytrid infections in captivity but remain difficult to use in the wild as they require repeated applications. In this context a new publication from the Institute of Zoology in London and Durrell and the University of Kent looking at in-situ treatments of the mountain chicken frog (Leptodactylus fallax) represents an important step forward. Populations of this charismatic frog species, native only to the islands of Montserrat and Dominica in the Caribbean, have been devastated by the chytrid and despite the establishment of several captive breeding collections the situation in the wild remains critical. The study describes an experiment where over the course of 24 weeks frogs were captured and marked using pit tags, swabbed for the presence chytrid on the skin and then some were treated in the field using itraconazole for 15 weeks. Of 228 frogs only 13 tested negative for chytrid infections and by the end of the study 50 frogs had been found dead. Disappointingly, treatment did not prevent frogs from dying from the infection but it significantly increased their chance to live longer, with models suggesting that treating the entire population would have extended their survival by 75 weeks. The antifungal treatment also reduced the infection rate during the treatment period, suggesting there might be a short-term prophylactic effect. While the treatment effects were short-lived and did not prevent the individuals affected from eventually dying from the infection, it is important to note that the treatment period was short in itself and impacts might have been considerably more positive if it would have been further extended. Overall though, while encouraging, this study shows that a field-based solution for mitigating the impacts of Bd for amphibian populations remains elusive for the moment and also indicates that such efforts in the wild would require highly intensive and expensive treatment solutions. As such, captive collections and captive breeding by zoos and other research facilities remain a critical safety net for a wide diversity of amphibian species in the face of the chytrid epidemic.

References

Bosch et al., 2015 Successful elimination of a lethal wildlife infectious disease in nature Biol. Lett. (2015) http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0874

Hudson et al. (2016) In-situ itraconazole treatment improves survival rate during an amphibian chytridiomycosis epidemic Biological Conservation 195, pp 37-45 doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.041

Further information about the Mountain Chicken Frog

https://www.zsl.org/conservation/regions/americas/mountain-chicken-frog-conservation

Inspired By Nature: “Brrugh!” said the frog

March 22, 2016 by admin

^{Inspired by Nature is a themed Croak to entertain you with some of our favourite artwork based on nature and the outdoors. We hope it will stimulate you to get creative and produce something yourself. If you do and would like to share them with us, please post them on our Facebook page, Twitter account, or email us at info@froglife.org}

^{This months feature has been written by Rebecca Neal our Conservation Youth Worker on the Peterborough Green Pathways project, funded by BBC Children in Need.}

This poem was inspired by a visit to Olive Branch Community Garden with a group of young people from Ken Stimpson Community School. We spent ages just looking at the frog-frenzy in the pond and listening to the noise the boy frogs were making to attract the girls. We counted at least 300 frogs. We made some acrostic poems (where you use the letters from a word to start each line of a poem) and did some reptile- and amphibian-inspired clay sculptures.

“Brrugh!” said the frog

“Brrrugh!” said the frog, “Come on ladies, get up!”

“The pond is warm, join us in the tub”

“Cwarp!” said the toad “its spring, wake up girls!”

“If you come, we can dance, and I’ll give you a twirl”

“How you doing?” said the newt “Like my aftershave?”

“Let me waft it your way, then we’ll go for a rave”

“Can I rub your back?” said the adder to his misses

“We can tie the knot, and I’ll give you lots of kisses”

“I’ve chased off all the others, so we can be alone.”

“Mrs Lizard, will you join me on this really warm stone?”

“Awesome!” said the child “We should make a movie.”

“Leonardo DiCaprio would make it really groovy

Here is the acrostic written by one of the students:

Frogs

Rocking in the pond

Out

Getting rays of sun

Let’s not forget they also live on land

In the pond they lay their eggs

Fighting for their girls

Everyone loves frogs

We would love to hear about your writing inspired by nature. E-mail us on info@froglife.org, find us on facebook.com/froglife or tweet us @froglifers

Froglife has bagged a share of a £11.5million carrier bag charge fund

March 21, 2016 by admin

Froglife are delighted to announce they have bagged £10,000 from the Tesco Bags of Help initiative.

The supermarket teamed up with Groundwork to launch its Bags of Help initiative, which saw grants of £12,000, £10,000 and £8,000 – all raised from the 5p bag levy – being awarded to environmental and greenspace projects.

Eight million shoppers voted in stores up and down the country. And it can now be revealed Froglife has been awarded £10,000.

The results have been announced and Froglife will now begin work on bringing their project to life.

Froglife have recently taken over management of Boardwalks Nature Reserve in Peterborough, a fantastic place for their favourite species, and have already started some improvements through their River Nene Dragon Finder project. You may have seen new ponds being created and some trees removed to stop leaf litter silting up existing ponds. But you may also have noticed vandalised information boards and the lack of seats. You may not have even known you were on a reserve with such interesting wildlife. Tesco’s Bags of Help funding will help Froglife to provide homes for all kinds of wildlife here, and make it accessible and fun for families. Froglife will now be able to demonstrate that the area is being looked after, which will reduce antisocial behaviour.

Over the next 6 months you will see new signs, beautifully carved benches, a pond dipping platform and more bat and bird boxes. In the autumn Froglife will do further habitat work to improve the ponds for amphibians.

Froglife will be delivering some of the work through their projects with vulnerable and disadvantaged young people in Peterborough. They will learn new skills, gain confidence, and improve their social skills whilst they contribute in a positive way to our community.

“We are so pleased we have some money to improve this site. I can’t wait to get young people down there and start using their ideas.” Said Rebecca Neal, Froglife’s Conservation Youth Worker on the Green Pathways project.

Caroline Silke, Head of Community at Tesco, said: “Bags of Help has been a fantastic success.

“We have been overwhelmed by the response of our customers and the feedback has been brilliant.

“We can’t wait to see the money being put to use bringing these projects to life.

“Nominations for the next round of the initiative will open in April and we look forward to helping a further round of groups and projects bag their share of the bag charge fund.”

Voting ran in store from 27 February until 6 March – with customers choosing which group they’d like to get the top award using a token given to them at the check-out in store.

Tesco estimated that around eight million votes were cast in stores across the UK.

Groundwork’s national chief executive, Graham Duxbury, said: “We have been delighted to have been involved in the Bags of Help project.

“It has been wonderful to follow the projects through the application process to the final announcement.

“This is money which will go directly back into the communities up and down the country creating places to meet people, be active, play or simply relax. This initiative is really putting something back into the local environment, transforming greenspaces and helping the community at a grass-roots level.”

Nominations and applications for the next round of Bags of Help funding will open on April 18. As well as applying direct, suggestions for projects can also be nominated by people living locally.

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