It started out as so many audaciously improbable ideas do — as a throwaway line at a cocktail party, soon to be forgotten. Except in this case, it wasn’t.
Rich Block, the former director of the Santa Barbara Zoo, got to talking with Jenn Perry, a high-ranking administrator with Cal State University Channel Islands, at such a party. He told Perry she should make space for a conservation center that the zoo could run. It could be a joint venture, he said, to help creatures in the area make their way back from the brink.
The idea stuck with Perry. Several years later, the zoo and CSUCI have signed an MOU allowing the construction of a 9,000-square-foot teaching center on the Ventura campus for the intervention, restoration, and conservation of 10 critters that are either on the federal threatened or endangered species list.
The center is a long way from breaking ground pending a multimillion-dollar fundraising effort. But earlier this year in a small makeshift lab, under the leadership of new zoo president Charles Hopper, intervention efforts got underway to give gooey egg masses of potential red-legged frogs a fighting chance of making the leap into tadpoles.
These metamorphosing creatures — collected from streams and creeks east of Highway 101 near Mulholland Drive ― were kept in mesh containers allowing for the steady flow of fresh water and a steady diet of tadpole flakes. Thanks to people such as Nadya Seal, a conservation scientist with the zoo for 11 years now, the tadpoles were then deposited into creeks and streams up in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Until the 1970s, red-legged frogs were the biggest amphibians — they grow up to five-and-a-half inches — in all the western United States. But in the 1970s, the frog hit skids, losing 70 percent of its habitat to human intrusion and 90 percent of its population. Up by the Santa Monica mountains, they were completely gone. With the frog declared a threatened species, certain protections kicked in. But for those protections to be meaningful, there have to be actual frogs occupying the habitat in question.
That’s where relocation efforts come in. According to Seal, the zoo — working in conjunction with the National Parks Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife ― has managed to translocate 2,400 baby froglets over a four-year period.
But that’s just the start. After that, there are backcountry trips to track down their red-legged spawn. Is the program working? How could results get better? Are populations getting established? Implanted computer chips help. AI is also used to distinguish the red-legged frog’s distinctive croak from that of other frog species in the great wall of sound created by nocturnal frog choirs.
It takes a village, it seems, to raise a red-legged frog.
In person, Seal is part Jane Goodall, part Indiana Jones, hiking up streams and creeks looking for clusters of gooey egg masses to scoop up. “They’re pretty obvious,” she says. “They look like grape clusters but smaller.” Typically, they’re attached to the stalks of aquatic vegetation so they don’t get washed downstream.
When it comes to the fecundity of red-legged romance, it’s all about the water. Mating is timed to coincide with winter rains. The males show up a couple of weeks early to stake out their spots underwater. When the females — about a pound heavier — appear, the males serenade them from their submerged perches.
Frogs breathe through their skin as well as their lungs and can sing while underwater. It’s believed that the females are drawn to low-croaking mates, the sound perhaps suggesting an element of strength. There’s nothing remotely rhapsodic about red-legged frog sex. The male, it turns out, has no penis; the female has no sex organ either. Both have an opening called a cloaca, out of which the eggs flow from the female and the sperm from the male.
So, to anatomically align, the female carries the male around on her back, with him sprouting special protuberances on his thumbs called “nuptial pads” to better hold on. If a female is not in the mood, she will play dead. Her job in this unique mating dance is to find the exact spot where her eggs stand the best chance of survival; that dance can take up to two days.
Temperature, smell, and water speed all play a role. Survival is a major challenge. Typically, it takes a week for the eggs to become tadpoles and then seven months for the tadpoles to become frogs. How does a red-legged mom suss out the ambient conditions? Science is still figuring that out.
With wildfires, droughts, flash floods, toxic chemicals, creek diversions, and road construction, it’s little wonder the survival rate for red-legged frog eggs is about one percent. Throw in the omnivorous bullfrogs — East Coast transplants who can jump twice as high and far ― and it’s a wonder there are any red-leggeds left to save. Bullfrogs are rapacious eating machines. Even their tadpoles — born equipped with beaks ― eat their red-legged counterparts.
For Seal, her work with the red-legged frogs is just part of a broader portfolio. Conservation and preservation is her thing; during her 11 years with the zoo, she’s done similar work with California condors, sea otters, snowy plovers, and island foxes.
What makes the red-legged frogs stand out? “It’s the whole metamorphosis,” she explains. “They start out as underwater creatures. Then they become land creatures. It’s amazing. But we also came from the sea. This is how evolution happens.”