We made a frog population!
We recently delivered another 1000 juvenile gopher frogs to the introduciton site in Early County, GA. Earlier in the year, our colleague John Jensen made an awesome discovery at the introduction site. For those that don't know, Gopher frogs are rare and declining, and our lab in collaboration with Robert Hill and Joe Mendelson at Zoo Atlanta, Dante Fenolio and Mark Mandica at Atlanta Botanical Garden, Lora Smith at the Jones Center, and Berkeley Boone of Bear Hollow have been rearing captive frogs for release. We had been waiting through a protracted drought in the hopes that the new breeding site would fill and the frogs had survived and would breed. Earlier this year we detected a mature female in a burrow near the site. This year the site ponded for the first time since 2010...and the frogs did their thing.
