Gratwicke is also a skilled photographer. He photographs every frog he captures for an amphibian project on the web.
Now, in a park near Panama City, the Smithsonian team has established temporary facilities for the captured frogs. Inside shipping containers, about 200 frogs are kept healthy in the lead up to breeding them.
"Here we have a La Loma tree frog," Gratwicke said. "It's a beautiful green tree frog that has a slight orange eye stripe and is very sensitive to
Chytridia Micosis
. It ranges from Costa Rica all the way to Colombia."
Gratwicke says the fungus can only be treated in captivity. This harlequin frog is native only to Central Panama.
"By the time we started our project, Chytridium had already hit Panama and it wiped out a lot of these frogs," Gratwicke recalled. "So these ones are very rare now in the wild, their population crashed. This is a very rare frog on the brink of extinction."
Keeping frogs healthy in captivity is not easy. The challenge is to produce food that has not been contaminated by the fungus. They also produce cockroaches and worms. In a separate location is a frog's favorite meal: fruit flies in almost all sizes.
"If you see in this coconut fiber this tiny little white specks crawling around, those are the springtails," noted Gratwicke. "It's the smallest food we can cultivate and that's what the baby frogs eat."
Back in Washington DC, at the National Zoo, some Panamanian golden frogs are being kept alive.
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2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27