Biologists, zoos work to save Mississippi gopher frogs

November 2, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Pick up a Mississippi gopher frog and it covers its eyes with its forefeet, like someone afraid to see what’s coming next. And for at least a decade, it’s had good reason not to look.

This year, for a change, nature gave a bit of a break to one of the nation’s most endangered species.

Few remain in the wild, with the Detroit Zoo and four other zoos holding several dozen as well.

Mississippi gopher frogs breed only in ponds so shallow they dry up in summer. Hot, dry springs have stranded tadpoles every year since 1998, when 2,488 froglets hopped out of Glen’s Pond in coastal Harrison County, Miss.

The pond held water longer this year. And 181 tadpoles survived a deadly parasite, made it through metamorphosis and headed into the surrounding DeSoto National Forest.

Biologists saved seven generations. They wash some eggs in well water, apparently removing the parasite, hatch them in a lab and put the tadpoles in screen-covered outdoor tanks.

Scientists believe fewer than 100 mature adults live in the wild. Five zoos — in Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami and Omaha, Neb. — have 75 more frogs.

“Our efforts have managed to stave off likely extinction, but there’s a long way to go,” said Joe Pechmann, an associate professor of biology at Western Carolina University who has studied the frogs since 2002.

Mississippi gopher frogs once lived in longleaf pine forests from western Alabama to southeast Louisiana. Timbering all but eradicated those forests.

Scientists estimate the population from those breeding each year. This year, 50 came to Glen’s Pond. Thirty of them were tank-raised; the remaining 20 had hatched in 2001 and 1998.

Other counts are next to impossible: The frogs live underground, in stump holes and burrows dug by other animals.

They have other oddities. Their breeding call sounds like snoring. And, rather than the smooth backs of many frogs, theirs have bumps that secrete a bitter, milky fluid. Pechmann thinks their “see-no-evil” pose may protect frogs’ faces until predators taste the liquid and drop them.

Mississippi gopher frogs face dangers common to all amphibians — predators that eat most of their young, human destruction and pollution of their habitat, and parasites more devastating to amphibians than the Great Plague was to humans.

Scientists estimate that the world has lost up to 170 frog species just in the last decade, and 1,900 more are threatened.

Until 2004, when a much smaller colony was found and a third was created, Glen’s Pond was the Mississippi gopher frogs’ only known breeding spot.

“People look at temporary ponds and they think there’s something wrong with them,” either filling them in or digging them deeper for fish ponds or cattle watering holes, Pechmann said. “But the reality is, there’s a lot of species such as gopher frogs that depend on temporary ponds; they can’t live anywhere else.”