Frequently
Asked Questions:
Frog Rescue
Because frogs are commonly seen wildlife, there is a misconception
that they have been the subject of rescue and care for many decades and
lots of people everywhere know how to do this. Not at all true. As a group,
they have been ignored until very recently when it became obvious that
they are being wiped off the face of the earth. Now there is a sudden
awareness and concern for them and the community wants them to be saved
- but there are still very few people out there who have gained experience
in this new field. We started soliciting frogs from the public back in
August 1998 - long before rehab became a household word!
The answers to the questions below are meant to describe the situation
here in far north Queensland (FNQ) but also have a lot of relevance to
the situation around Australia and elsewhere in the world.
Why
did you start a frog hospital?
Why are amphibians so different from other wildlife
which gets rescued?
Why are they diseased so often?
Can't someone just look after injured frogs and not
sick ones?
Sometimes
when you have run out of money for your rescue activity, I notice your
website says not to bring FNQ frogs to rescue groups but to vets only.
Why do you say that?
Does
that mean that the public should not pick up frogs to get them help?
I've
called several vets to help this frog and they all said no. How come more
veterinarians don't treat them?
Zoos handle animals - can I just bring the frog to a zoo?
Can I get help for my frog from a frog researcher?
You seem to have a lot of disease problems there in tropical
Australia. Is it like that anywhere else in the world?
I'm not in tropical Queensland or not in Australia
- how do I find someone to help me with my sick or injured frog?
How can I learn more about rescuing and rehabilitating
amphibians?
What has changed for frog rehab since you first started
the practice?
Why
did you start a frog hospital?
I first became involved
with frog conservation in Feb. 1994 while living in Sydney. I moved to
FNQ when my health became problematic in March 1996 and I was looking
for a way I could contribute to frog knowledge from home. There were two
frog issues I felt needed to be addressed. The first was to know when
the disease chytrid fungus arrived in the area. The second much bigger
issue was that it had been demonstrated time and again that no species
of amphibian can be considered secure - that the arrival of a disease
could wipe out a species in a matter of months. Therefore, all amphibians
should be viewed as vulnerable regardless of their breeding rates or current
status, and that factors which could contribute to their loss needed to
be understood and fixable. The notion that an endangered individual could
be lost to a broken leg, an attack by another animal or a simple infection
was not acceptable. Somebody had to start learning rescue and rehabilitation
techniques so that frogs could be saved from threats and not be allowed
to simply disappear into extinction. I already had captive husbandry experience
with a variety of species so expanding this into rehab was the next logical
step. I started taking in injured frogs from the neighbourhood and it
very rapidly mushroomed from there. Because frogs needed help and nobody
else regionally was doing this, the demands for my services grew fast
and a non-profit group was established to attract the resources I, as
a pensioner, did not have.
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Why
are amphibians so different from other wildlife which gets rescued?
It is a fact that
the entire concept of rescuing and rehabilitating amphibians is still
new and very few people have ventured into it at all, even overseas. Our
Curator was ridiculed by other frog conservationists when she first created
our setup for receiving frogs from the public 11 years ago. Because this
group of animals generally produces large clutches of eggs which can number
in the thousands per clutch, they are seen as plentiful compared with
other animals which only reproduce in very small numbers. The effort and
money needed to save one frog when it comes from a clutch of 1,500 has
often been viewed as a waste of limited rescue resources, even by those
concerned about frogs!
The biology on these
animals is also very different and allows them to be affected by more
problems. Their skin is porous and can absorb pollutants instantly; they
have no protective rib cage like other animals so their internal organs
are not well protected from trauma. They have limited ways of expressing
clinical symptoms so their conditions are more cryptic and take more experience
over time to uncover. The last issue of course is that they haven't been
the subject of decades of close contact by a wide variety of people so
very little information is available about their husbandry, reaction to
environmental changes, etc. They are an animal that seems to be more affected
by disease in the past couple decades than any other animal.
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Why
are they diseased so often?
Frog's porous skin
allows them to absorb what's in their environment like a sponge. They
can be easily affected by pollutants but also by changes in their ecosystem
such as drought, radical temperature extremes, loss of canopy cover, changes
in the abundance of parasites in the environment, reduction of food abundance
or quality. This is why they have earned the name "environmental
indicator". However, disease has been a recent phenomenon worldwide.
Based on our 11 years experience with amphibian health issues here in
tropical north Queensland, it is our belief that the problem with frogs
worldwide is that their immune systems are being compromised by something,
making them more susceptible to whatever disease problem happens to be
in their area. In FNQ, we have identified one species in particular which
is suffering immune deficiency more than any other and that is the White-lipped
tree frog, Litoria infrafrenata. This is the first of several uncataloged
conditions which we first pinpointed back in 1999.
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Can't
someone just look after injured frogs and not sick ones?
In this region, there
are so many disease issues that it is extremely rare for a frog to come
in with only an injury. For example, since July 2002 when the "respiratory/nervous
system" condition outbreak started, we have had more than 1,500 individual
frogs turned in. Of that number, only two of them were injured without
any other health problems. Every other injured frog we have seen has had
health problems and parasites and most of their injuries were actually
caused by the frog being sick in the first place. An additional factor
is that trauma on a frog can trigger health issues so a frog that has
been injured is likely to pick up other problems that might be active
in the area. It is advisable to always handle injured frogs with the same
procedures as for those that are ill and that is with disposable gloves,
properly disinfected enclosures and components, one frog per enclosure/tank
and isolation from other animals in care.
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Sometimes
when you have run out of money for your rescue activity, I notice your
website says not to bring FNQ frogs to rescue groups but to vets only.
Why do you say that?
One of our concerns
is the protection of wildlife carers in FNQ which seems to be a frog disease
"hot spot". Here in Queensland, we had a situation several years
ago where two bat carers became sick and died. It turns out that the bats
they were looking after were carrying a virus called Lyssavirus. Nobody
told them this could happen and the relevant authorities probably didn't
even anticipate that such a thing could happen. Since then, there have
been multiple incidents in Queensland where professionals employed to
work with horses have died from another virus, Hendra virus. Diseases
are getting around and very little work has been done to screen wildlife
- it tends to be AFTER a tragedy has struck that a problem gets any attention.
Wildlife carers devote their time and own money to looking after animals
in distress and are often the first people who have contact with potentially
diseased animals - even before vets. If you can't find help for an amphibian
in distress, most local wildlife rescue volunteers will take your frog
even if they haven't had much experience with them. This dedication is
a fantastic attribute but it should not be taken advantage of. In our
opinion, there is insufficient communication between the biosecurity community
and carers and this leaves carers in a vulnerable position. We have been
raising this in submissions to the government for many years but it will
cost substantial funding to address so it keeps getting pushed to the
back burner. Some not-very-friendly parasites have been in frogs for a
long time but, after cyclone Larry, a wider range of fungi and especially
bacteria were found on frogs. Since the heavy wet season of 2007/08, some
very nasty bacteria have been turning up on frogs including Steptococcus,
Clostridium, Serratia and Pseudomonas. Based on these results
from government labs, we recommend a conservative approach by suggesting
that local carers should NOT get involved with caring for these animals
UNLESS they have proper handling and disinfection procedures in
place and have received training from us in how to recognise the very
cryptic clinical symptoms associated with some of these conditions.
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Does
that mean that the public should not pick up frogs to get them help?
We have been recommending
to everyone to use gloves or a plastic bag over your hand to handle any
frogs or toads, even if you think they look pretty good. Not all of them
will have something nasty on their skin but you won't be able to tell
which ones so we suggest they all be handled conservatively. It is simply
a matter of not touching them with your bare skin. We have been including
this statement in nearly all our press releases for the past three years
and the media keeps taking that message out of the stories. We have notices
in all the relevant pages in this site and we tell folks this on the phone.
But yet, we have had folks bring in sick frogs and report that their kids
have been playing with them in the meantime (not good for the stressed
out sick frog either!). Wearing something on your hands is a simple precaution
to prevent any undesirable situations! We also recommend that as soon
as a frog is found that isn't normal, it should be directed to someone
right away - don't try to hold on it yourself for a few days to see what
happens.
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I've
called several vets to help this frog and they all said no. How come more
veterinarians don't treat them?
This is not a simple
issue and might have different explanations in different areas. Part of
the answer concerns the pet trade. Commercialism tends to be way ahead
of the husbandry and care areas - somebody will sell it even if nobody
knows how to look after it. There is a substantial lag time after an animal
becomes commercially available before information starts to flow about
proper care and how to fix things that go wrong. The pet trade in frogs
exists but it is on a small scale so there are not a lot of customers
banging on clinic doors demanding services for their pets.
Finances figure into
it as well. You wouldn't think twice about spending a few hundred dollars
on vet care for the bird you paid $500 for (and another $1,000 for its
cage and supplies) but you might not want to spend a few hundred dollars
on the frog you paid $30 for or one which you found in your yard. Likewise,
if a vet clinic only gets one or two calls a year about amphibians, they
might not want to invest in the time and training it will take to come
up to speed with the range of amphibian health problems.
Another factor is
where would an interested vet get training in frog husbandry and medical
care? This is not taught in vet school and there is very little information
floating around to grab on to. Again using the comparison to birds, there
are thousands of aviculturists in many countries who have been keeping
a huge range of species for decades. Most are members of organisations
and all of these have newsletters and magazines to share information plus
commercial magazines and how-to books. The bird trade and supplies is
worth at least a couple billion dollars a year so information and shared
experience is everywhere. And yet, not all vets have added birds to their
repetoire despite the size of the market. Large scale keeping and knowledge
sharing has hardly even begun for amphibians so there is very little information
available. We often receive emails from visitors to our website who comment
that ours is the only site they could find anywhere with information
on whatever-it-is health problem they were researching.
The next factor is
the changing environment and the speed with which new, uncataloged, undescribed
problems are appearing in amphibians. There are no simple tests for many
of these problems so once the sick frog is sitting in front of the interested
vet, what kinds of diagnostics are going to be available to them? Let's
use the example of the only officially recognised amphibian disease problem
in Australia - chytrid fungus. If you found a vet to look at your frog
which might have chytrid fungus and you want the frog to be tested for
it, there are two testing methods available for chytrid, both of which
cost over $200 and might not actually provide an accurate result. If your
frog has one of the new conditions we have discovered here in FNQ like
the "respiratory/nervous system" condition (for example), it
is an environmental toxin and there is no test at all (we identify it
by its clinical presentation). So even an interested vet might be frustrated
by the lack of tools available to them to help you. To avoid such frustration,
it is easier not to include amphibians in their clinic.
Lastly, vet clinics
focus on emergency care and routine procedures. An amphibian with a couple
health problems could easily need over 3 months of care to restore healthy
condition and weight. This is a long time in a vet practice and if the
animal is rescued wildlife, who is going to be covering its care costs?
These can really start to add up once staff time is required for weeks
on end plus maintaining a constant supply of the live food that frogs
eat.
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Zoos
handle animals - can I just bring the frog there?
It depends on the
regulatory environment zoos operate under in your area and whether they
are operating a quarantine setup. Here in Queensland, zoos do not have
default permission to engage in rehabilitation. There are specific permits
they must have in place (as well as the ability to quarantine any rescued
wildlife). A zoo which has amphibians on display will have the right permits
but, because they have healthy amphibians in their collection, they might
not want to risk having diseased amphibians coming in the door.
Zoos overall may assist
the odd unfortunate animal but they are not in the business of spending
money on rehabbing small animals when there are organisations to do this.
However, some very large zoos like Taronga and Sea World have dedicated
care facilities for specific animal types that cannot be readily assisted
by the public such as sea turtles, fairy penguins, seals, etc. But when
it comes to amphibians, keepers are not likely to be trained in amphibian
health issues (especially the new conditions) unless they have a personal
interest and search for information. We have been contacted by zoos that
have frogs on exhibit to provide diagnosis and treatment information for
problems that have turned up in their display animals. Even if a zoo doesn't
want to engage in rehab, they still might know where you can go for help
so they are certainly worth a phone call to enquire.
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Can
I get help for my frog from a frog researcher?
It depends on the
individual researcher. These are very busy people trying desperately to
catch up to the causes of rapid global decline in frogs. They have strict
budgets for their projects and limited spare time so they might not be
able to cope with the distraction and resource drain of fixing up frogs
for return to the wild and they certainly won't want to treat pet frogs
(unless this is something they are doing to raise a little more money
for their studies).
The focus of a frog
researcher is to be successful on their research projects and they need
sick frogs for study in the lab. These frogs are not returned to the wild.
While no-one who tries to help a distressed frog wants to see it put down,
it is an important part of learning more about the diseases that are popping
up all around the planet. If you have a really sick frog and there is
a frog researcher in your area, you might want to consider allowing the
frog to be used for scientific purposes.
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You
seem to have a lot of disease problems there in tropical Australia. Is
it like that anywhere else in the world?
While there are researchers
in many parts of the world working on various projects to do with chytrid
fungus, comparitively little work is taking place on other amphibian health
problems so it is probably true to say that nobody knows the full scope
of what is happening to amphibians around the world. We do know that several
viruses in the ranavirus/iridovirus group are causing species declines
in the USA and that there is also a serious problem there with parasites
(the malformed frogs issue first discovered in Minnesota). In the UK,
there was a ranavirus problem several years ago followed by an outbreak
of Aeromonas ("Red leg"). It is quite likely that many
more disease problems exist but too few people are actually looking for
them. But even if someone finds evidence of a new problem to be investigated,
the funding has to come from somewhere for a full investigation and that's
where fierce competition enters the scene! Unfortunately, a lot of other
environmental problems are considered far more important than frogs!
[back to top]
I'm
not in tropical Queensland / not in Australia - how do I find someone
to help me with my sick or injured frog?
The first place to
try is to contact a couple wildlife rescue organisations in your area
to see if they have any experienced carers for amphibians
or if they can at least tell you which vets they use and then contact
those vets to see if they will help you with a frog or toad. You can also
try the nearest office of a Fish and Wildlife Service or environment department
- these would be the regulatory authorities who would be providing licences
to people to operate as rescuers of wildlife. They might have someone
on their database who specialises in amphibians. Another option is to
check with the nearest university to see if they have a vet school. There
might be an interested teacher or student there who has kept amphibians
and is interested in learning more about them. There are also pet keepers'
groups and discussion forums on the net (start with yahoo groups) which
have some very experienced keepers who have learned something about issues
that have come up in their own animals. These groups are often by species
so there will be a Phyllomedusa keeper's group or a Dendrobates
group for example. Visit the websites of Herpdigest, Kingsnake.com, www.frogs.org
and Melissa Kaplan's Herp Care collection for more links.
In Australia, there
is www.frogs.org.au - follow the links for Community and then select Health
and Disease. At the top of the topics list is a list of vets that members
have used. The forum is moderated by experienced frog keepers from the
Amphibian Research Centre, the FATS Group in Sydney, and ourselves. We
also do long-distance diagnosis and have assisted vets, zoos, keepers
and rehabbers around Australia and overseas. See the symptoms
of a sick frog page for a description of the background and photos
we need.
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How
can I learn about rescuing and rehabilitating amphibians?
The first step to
take is to gain keeping experience with a variety of species in your area.
The only way to know what is wrong with a frog/toad is to know what is
NORMAL for a frog/toad. Learn the animal's behaviour patterns, normal
fluctuations in skin colouring, variations in appearance for each species,
normal growth rates and seasonal habits, etc. If you can successfully
keep a variety of species healthy for a period of time (say a couple years),
then you are ready to find someone to teach you rehab techniques and types
of disease problems that might be active in your area. The key to identifying
most of the conditions we have is to pay attention to fine details such
as a change in the type of moisture on the skin; blotches on the toes;
a change in posture, etc.
It depends on where
you are but it is likely you will need to find an individual who has done
this themselves to teach you. We learned by consulting every relevant
professional we could to gain their pieces of information about one facet
of a problem and put all their pieces together over time with our own
observations. We chased vets for technique and drug information and labs
for cultures and pathology results. You will need a "friendly"
interested vet to get medications from and various tests such as impression
smears, x-rays, etc. Try the Association of Amphibian and Reptilian Vets
in the USA for the closest member to your area. You'll also need some
financing from somewhere to cover lab involvement and treatment costs
- a diagnostic from a vet lab can run a couple of hundred dollars. If
you are dealing specifically with a wild caught amphibian (not pets),
then the government should have testing labs that will do tests for free.
In the USA, one of the leading amphibian labs is the National Wildlife
Health Centre in Madison, Wisconsin.
There are very few
books available on amphibian medicine - an essential one to get is "Amphibian
Medicine and Amphibian Husbandry" by Wright and Whittaker. It is
not cheap at around $150 or $175 USD but far cheaper than the Heatwole
series which will run you about $1,000 for the seven volumes written thus
far.
There is an amphibian
conservation course that has been developed in the UK but we don't know
if it includes rehab techniques. There is also the Pautuxet Wildlife Research
Centre in Maryland which may or may not include amphibians. We have developed
our own amphibian rehab course which you would need to travel to Cairns
to take. Instruction is personalized, runs five hours a day and takes
between two to four days depending on your previous knowledge. Contact
us to ask for more information if you are planning any travel here.
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What has changed for frog rehab since you first
started doing the practice?
The pursuit of new
environmental problems is an extremely difficult area for a non-profit
to work in. We are at the front line of receiving animals with unidentified
conditions, cataloguing those conditions while trying to ensure our own
safety, and proving to a largely skeptical government and academic community
that these problems are genuine and need proper investigation. After 11
years, only the number of new problems to catalog has changed (they've
increased). None of the new problems we described has been isolated or
characterised and our acquired knowledge is still not recognised on an
official level - despite the awards our Curator has received for her work
in amphibian health. It seems the more we learn and the more we try to
share, the more criticism we cop, especialy from some academics.
On the other hand,
we have proven to the community at large that frogs can be recovered,
they deserve to be assisted and that there can be extremely useful environmental
information available through the practice of rescue and rehab. We have
done presentations promoting the concept of rehabilitation to national
frog conferences and carers conferences (as well as presentations to government
meetings and disease groups) but uptake is still very slow. Our extensive
experience is still relied upon by the FNQ community but support in this
difficult economy is extremely low and far more income is needed to keep
up with the demands of large numbers of sick frogs but also to expand
our outreach capabilities.
Last
edited: August 16th, 2009
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