More information can be found at the top of the blog on a separate page, but it really is easy. What are you or have you seen and enjoyed in nature? It can be from your own backyard, the local park, out on a hike or anywhere. What plants and animals catch your interest? Do you garden? Have you read a good book on nature? 

Write a blog post with a photo, a story, a poem, or anything goes because I love to see what Mother Nature is up to in your area. Please submit one blog post per week and link back to Nature Notes in some way.

Last week’s Nature Notes

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Frogs, toads and salamanders were part of my childhood. We spent every summer at a log cabin with a pond and listened to the frog calls at night, caught frogs and red efts. Living near creeks and ponds and protected wetland woods as meant I can still be a child. But things have changed. Amphibians are in decline like insects. Habitat loss and pesticide and herbicide run-off are affecting frogs.

When we moved here I became interested and was happy to join SAVE THE FROGS. I became concerned about lawn spray companies spraying too close to the pond and contact authroties and became involved with a county lawsuit against the largest company. lots of work with little to show for it. Nothing will make people stop spraying their lawns.

The current adminstration has prioritized coal, pesticides, herbicides and a ballroom over human and environmental concerns. Groups have fight for years to have Round-Up removed. Glyphosate and its commercial formulations like Roundup are acutely toxic to amphibians. This is the same chemical that the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The same chemical that has generated tens of thousands of cancer lawsuits against Bayer/Monsanto. The same chemical a federal court ruled the EPA improperly approved because it ignored cancer and endangered species risks.

if we don’t care about human health we certainly don’t care about wildlife.

bullfrog

This is from SAVE THE FROGS……PHOTOS ARE MINE

Why Frogs Are Important

Frog populations have been declining worldwide at unprecedented rates, and nearly one-third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction. Up to 200 species have completely disappeared since 1980, and this is NOT normal: amphibians naturally go extinct at a rate of only about one species every 500 years!!! Amphibian populations are faced with an array of environmental problems, including pollution, infectious diseases, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and over-harvesting for the pet and food trades. Unless we act quickly, amphibian species will continue to disappear, resulting in irreversible consequences to the planet’s ecosystems and to humans. Frogs eat mosquitoes; provide us with medical advances; serve as food for birds, fish and monkeys; and their tadpoles filter our drinking water. Plus frogs look and sound cool, and kids love them — so there are lots of reasons to save the frogs!

“When we save the frogs, we’re protecting all our wildlife, all our ecosystems and all humans.” 
— Dr. Kerry Kriger, Founder & Executive Director of SAVE THE FROGS!,

Frogs are an integral part of the food web

Tadpoles keep waterways clean by feeding on algae. Adult frogs eat large quantities of insects, including disease vectors that can transmit fatal illnesses to humans (i.e. mosquitoes/malaria). Frogs also serve as an important food source to a diverse array of predators, including dragonflies, fish, snakes, birds, beetles, centipedes and even monkeys. Thus, the disappearance of frog populations disturbs an intricate food web, and results in negative impacts that cascade through the ecosystem.

Frogs are bioindicators

Most frogs require suitable habitat in both the terrestrial and aquatic environments, and have permeable skin that can easily absorb toxic chemicals. These traits make frogs especially susceptible to environmental disturbances, and thus frogs are considered accurate indicators of environmental stress: the health of frogs is thought to be indicative of the health of the biosphere as a whole. Frogs have survived in more or less their current form for 250 million years, having survived countless ice ages, asteroid crashes, and other environmental disturbances, yet now one-third of amphibian species are on the verge of extinction. This should serve as an alarm call to humans that something is drastically wrong in the environment.

Green Frog-Rana clamitans

Frogs are important in medical research that benefits humans

Frogs produce a wide array of skin secretions, many of which have significant potential to improve human health through their use as pharmaceuticals. Approximately 10% of Nobel Prizes in Physiology and Medicine have resulted from investigations that used frogs. When a frog species disappears, so does any promise it holds for improving human health.

A group of Russian researchers found over 76 different antimicrobial peptides on the skin of the European Common Brown Frog (Rana temporaria). “These peptides could be potentially useful for the prevention of both pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacterial strains” the scientists concluded.

The Northern Gastric Brooding Frog (Rheobatrachus vitellinus) lived exclusively in the Eungella Range in Queensland, Australia. These amazing frogs could actually shut down their gastric juices while rearing their young inside their stomachs! They therefore held great promise for advances in human medicine, as research on these frogs may have resulted in a cure for peptic ulcers, which affect 25 million people in the United States alone. Unfortunately, the gastric-brooding frogs vanished within a few years of being discovered by scientists. The health of humans and frogs is clearly intertwined.

green frogs

Frogs have every bit as much right to exist as do we

Frogs are an integral part of our existence on this planet and have every bit as much right to exist as do we. Moreover, if we allow one-third of the world’s amphibians to disappear, we set a bad precedent: perhaps future generations will use our irresponsible actions to justify allowing another third of amphibians or a third of the birds or reptiles to disappear. We caused the problem, so it’s our responsibilityand moral duty to make the necessary sacrifices and changes to SAVE THE FROGS!