The La Jolla institution marked its first-ever species reintroduction with 350 mountain yellow-legged frogs released in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has achieved a milestone in its growing conservation efforts: its first-ever species reintroduction. And it happened far from La Jolla.
The aquarium, in collaboration with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, UC Los Angeles, Big Bear Alpine Zoo and others, released more than 350 mountain yellow-legged frogs into the wild in Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains.
Members from Birch Aquarium, SDZWA, UCLA, Big Bear Alpine Zoo, The Wildlands Conservancy, Friends of Big Bear Valley and more joined forces to release over 350 endangered frogs. Photo courtesy of Birch Aquarium at Scripps/Alex Feltes
The reintroduction, into a wildlife preserve managed by The Wildlands Conservancy, is one of the largest releases so far and a significant step towards saving this endangered species.
“It was an incredibly exciting and emotional day for our team,” Sean Bruce, Birch’s assistant curator of Fishes and Invertebrates, said in a press release. “We have been raising these frogs for more than a year.”
Of the released frogs, 220 were raised at Birch Aquarium; the rest were raised at SDZWA and UCLA.
The effort, part of a long-running recovery program with partners at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the US Forest Service, was made possible by “the extraordinary dedication of our husbandry team and the invaluable collaboration of our partner organizations in this recovery project. Our shared passion and expertise made this success possible, and we hope these frogs thrive here for many years to come,” said Bruce.
To get the frogs from La Jolla and elsewhere into the mountains, each organization transported its frogs in coolers, then hiked the frogs to three sites along a lake within a protected reserve.
At the lake, the frogs were divided into two groups: one for hard release (immediate introduction to the lake) and the other for soft release (first into a specially-designed habitat for monitoring, then into the lake after acclimation). Each frog is microchipped for future research surveys.
“Thanks to these efforts, mountain yellow-legged frogs are hopping around Bluff Lake for the first time since they were last recorded here in 1951,” said Tim Krantz, conservation director for The Wildlands Conservancy.
Going forward, researchers will continue to monitor and track these endangered frogs at the release site multiple times each year, with the overarching goal to support the release of more frogs in the future.
