Trouble in love town for the faithful Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog

Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog. (Photo/Devin Edmonds, http://www.amphibiancare.com)

Most people consider loyalty an admirable trait, but for the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, faithfulness to a compromised breeding ground just might spell doom for the species. In many places, the frog’s habitat is drying up or swarming with ravenous introduced trout. A new study released by the USDA Forest Service in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences details the extent of this troubled relationship, and provides insights key to giving the frog a chance at survival.

Mountain yellow-legged frogs, (of which there are two species), adapted to live in high alpine lakes, in environmental extremes too cold and harsh for most amphibian species. This specialty helped the frogs thrive, but in the past century, the once common Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog has disappeared from more than 90 percent of its range. In 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that the mountain yellow-legged frog “warranted” endangered species listing, but was precluded due to the need to list more high priority species.

Likely culprits for the frog’s decline include the usual suspects like disease and contamination, but new research shows that the periodic drying up of habitat and predation from introduced trout coupled with the frog’s loyalty to specific breeding spots is pushing the animal ever closer to extinction.

Yellow-legged frogs need up to four years for their tadpoles to mature. So if a pond dries up, the species could lose up to four year-classes of offspring, issuing a serious blow to that particular population. The study also found that for some of the best ponds left for the frog, introduced trout then threaten the species. Offer a trout a yellow-legged frog and it won’t turn you down, no matter what the life stage of the dangling amphibian.

Kathleen Matthews and Haiganoush Preisler, scientists with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Center, conducted a 10-year study to measure the fidelity of yellow-legged frogs in Kings Canyon National Park, east of Fresno, Cali. They used mark-recapture techniques, and observed frog tendency to return to lakes even for locations that tended to dry up in low snowpack years, or where frogs had previously encountered predatory fish.

Fish removal appears to be a strong restoration technique, and projects underway show a rebounding in the order of tens of thousands of frog and tadpole populations in lakes where non-native fish have been eradicated. There may just be a little bit of hope yet for the garrulous hoppers, especially if restoration efforts incorporate knowledge of site fidelity into their tactics.

You can learn more about the natural history and restoration efforts behind this little frog at MYLfrog, or download the USDA Forest Service study here.

Reclamation, restoration and mountaintop removal

My first taste of reclamation came as a grad student while on a fieldtrip along Colorado’s “Uranium Highway.” We stopped in the ghost town of Uravan, a former Uranium/Vanadium boomtown. And except for a couple buildings, everything had been torn down, the tailings ponds evaporated, land reclaimed or in the process of being so. It was then that I learned that reclamation and restoration were not the same thing. Above the once upon town sat tailings sites. Instead of a rust-colored desert environment,  meticulous patterns of white and black rock zig-zagged across the hilltop, laid out like some sort of interpretive landscape project.

Reclamation, I thought, was supposed to help clean up after we’d finished using the land. It was supposed to help return the land to itself. I’ve seen many reclaimed sites since that fieldtrip, and have yet to come across one that resembled nature’s design.

That’s not to say that reclamation is a lost cause or a sham, just that it can be better. Now scientists are trying to help make that happen with arguably one of the most destructive and controversial mining practices at work today, mountaintop removal. Sarah Hall, of Kentucky State University,  and her colleagues Christopher Barton and Carol Baskin, of the University of Kentucky, have discovered a new method of replanting mined Appalachian sites, one that gives native landscapes a leg up at renewal. (You can find their study in the online early edition of Restoration Ecology)

Mountaintop removal reclamation projects often involve planting blasted and terraced mountainsides with non-native grasses. (Early surface mine reclamation would sometimes simply abandoned the site.) Perhaps one of the more unexpected outcomes of reclamation comes from Mingo County, W. Va., where reclamation turned a blast site into what’s now known as the Twisted Gun Golf Course.

Rather than seeding mined areas with grasses, which tend to stunt recovery of native species, Hall sought to test the possibility of replanting mountaintop removal sites with the trees and forbs kin to the forests that had existed before the mines. Hall’s idea seems in hindsight to be quite obvious. Put back the original topsoil scraped away when creating the mine. This soil she found was rich with the seeds and microbial recipe that could help re-establish forest. Where Hall and her team tried the method, the plants started to grow, including arrow-leaved asters, Virginia pines and blueberry.

The method is not enough to completely recover the forest, but it’s a start, and a step up from the grassy slopes that have come to replace so many of Appalachia’s mined mountainsides. Hall’s research highlights a two-fold lesson  – we need to recognize that reclamation is not restoration, and there are practical ways to make reclamation better. Then maybe these environments that have given us so much of their riches at least have a chance to return to themselves, even if it’s just a little.