got a call from my beloved via satellite phone the other day that began with “Well, the good news is, we’re ok!” I’ve gotten these calls before. They’re usually related to some kind of paddling trip somewhere in the Southwest in the middle of winter. And while the conversation temporarily affects your heart rate you hang up the phone knowing you’ll see each other again and have another hairy adventure story to talk about. The bad news, no matter how dismal, is completely overshadowed by the “We’re ok!” proclamation.
I started thinking about that good news/bad news dichotomy in terms of a project that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Canyon National Park. However, with this project the good news does not make the bad news seem insignificant. The bad news is bad as ever.
So, I’ll start there, with the bad news which is worldwide amphibian declines. Beginning in the 1970s, people started noticing rapid declines in local populations of amphibians. These population losses were happening in Australia, South and Central America and western North America. Species that had only recently been discovered, like the Golden Toad of the Costa Rican cloud forest, had disappeared less than thirty years after its discovery. In western Canada, millions of Northern Leopard Frogs bellied up. Gradually researchers pieced these and other stories together and by 1989, at the First World Congress of Herpetology, concluded that something was awry with global amphibian populations. Researchers continued to document these declines and, aided by the use of technology, integrated the information.
A recent global amphibian assessment combined data from over five hundred scientists in sixty countries. It offers some sobering statistics. There are currently 1,856 threatened amphibian species. That’s 32.5 percent of the known amphibian species on the planet. Of these, 435 species are in rapid decline. At least nine species have gone extinct since 1980 with another 113 species not reported from the wild in recent years and believed to be possibly extinct. This data is alarming because as G. B. Rabb of the Chicago Zoological Society states in his paper on the amphibian decline phenomenon, amphibians “may be the canaries in the coal mine of Mother Earth.”
Amphibians are intimately connected to their surrounding physical environment because their moist, permeable skins act as a conduit for water and gas exchange. They have the unfortunate role of being indicators of environmental health, the same environment that we move around in. While no one has been able to put a finger on exactly why we have had large scale amphibian die offs, things like climate change, chemical toxicants, acidification, nitrification, introduced predators, habitat alteration and increases in diseases among amphibians are all suspect. There may be no single, easily-remedied reason for the declines and that is what makes the problem so nagging and so difficult to approach. While amphibians are generally not considered high profile species like grizzly bears or wolves, their role as indicator species has thrust them into the limelight and grabbed our attention.
Scientists with the Arizona Department of Game and Fish started statewide surveys of our five native and one introduced leopard frog species in 1990 because they suspected declines and wanted to establish a statewide baseline. The Northern Leopard Frog became a candidate species for the state list of threatened wildlife after its numbers declined in Arizona. The idea to look at these frogs in the National Parks didn’t get off the ground until much later.

Beginning in 2003, Charles Drost, US Geological Survey Zoologist, and RV Ward, Wildlife Biologist for Grand Canyon, teamed up to launch a series of lake, river trip and hike-in amphibian surveys in the Glen and Grand Canyon regions with an emphasis on Northern Leopard Frogs. This frog had been documented inhabiting a fairly widespread area within Glen Canyon, historically, and was noted as being common in areas of good habitat. While known from far fewer places in Grand Canyon, it was documented there as well. When the reservoir known as Lake Powell filled, many of the historic locales for Northern Leopard Frogs were inundated and lost. The only recent information for leopard frogs around the lake came from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area Botanist, John Spence’s surveys of hanging gardens. Spence documented some new locations for Northern Leopard Frogs up riparian side arms and at springs in the early 1990s. Downstream in Grand Canyon, Northern Leopard Frogs had completely disappeared from one known locale. There were no reports of adult frogs and only a few isolated single tadpole sightings elsewhere.
Finding out what was happening to the region’s leopard frogs all of a sudden seemed like a good question to investigate. And, since there was no comprehensive baseline information, that was the place to begin. Historic locales were revisited and as many springs and side streams that could be accessed during the two year time-frame were surveyed. Data for all amphibian species observed was tabulated.
After a couple of years of surveys, the data showed that Northern Leopard Frog locales in Glen Canyon appear to be clustered around the Escalante arm of the lake with one other disjunct population located below the dam. Up until the spring of 2004, we had not documented a single leopard frog in Grand Canyon.
This is where the good news part of this story comes in. In early March of 2004, several of us, on the longest private trip launch of that year, were hiking and surveying up Surprise Canyon in western Grand Canyon. The habitat looked good: perennial surface flows of water with some deeper, slower moving pools interspersed with and surrounded by vegetation. Leopard frogs seem to like deep, dank pools with alcoves cut in the banks that they can dive into to escape detection or thick mats of grasses and cattails that they can disappear into on land. While walking along the edge of a pool ringed with cattails, we heard the distinct “plop” of a frog jumping into the water. After a minute of intensive searching three individual leopard frogs were spotted hiding under a cut bank. We captured and photographed an individual. Something about these frogs was different from the frogs we had been observing in Glen Canyon. They had far fewer spots than the typical Northern Leopard Frog. More importantly, the dorsolateral fold along either side of the frog’s body was somewhat discontinuous. These folds are diagnostic keys for leopard frog identification. In Northern Leopard Frogs they are continuous and unbroken. In the Surprise Canyon frogs, the terminal parts of the folds were broken. When we distributed the images to frog researchers and experts in the Southwest, all agreed that these probably were not Northern Leopard Frogs but some other species of leopard frog.
This discovery constituted a new record for an amphibian species in Grand Canyon National Park. But what species was it? Preliminary analysis of tissue samples by Jef Jaeger at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, showed that this frog is probably a Lowland Leopard Frog. While stable populations of this species occur in central Arizona, these frogs are rapidly declining in southeastern Arizona and are extirpated from southwestern Arizona. They are a candidate for threatened species in the state. Continuing genetic analysis will give us a better understanding of how this Surprise Canyon population of Lowland Leopard Frog is related to other populations distributed elsewhere in the state. Further surveys will continue to flesh out a picture of where leopard frogs are located in the region and what is happening to their numbers.
It is really amazing how little we know about the amphibians in the Southwest and how important it is to gather information given the global trends. One way to do this is to enlist the observation skills of all canyon users. If you work in the Canyon, find yourself hiking the trails or are motoring around on Lake Powell or Lake Mead and think you have come across a leopard frog, please send us your observations. Better yet, contact me and I’ll send you a set of laminated amphibian cards that you can keep in your ammo can or backpack. Note the location of your observation and take a picture of the frog if you can, but try not to handle it. Send requests for observation cards or actual observations and photos to: Lisa Gelczis, usgs-sbsc-cprs, 2255 N. Gemini Dr., Flagstaff, AZ 86001-1600; 928-556-7250. lisa.gelczis@nau.edu

Lisa Gelczis