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Need to Get In Touch With Us?
By email Feb 2010: We have new procedures for responding to requests for information or offers supposedly wanting to help our work. When emailing us, please provide the name of the internet service you use and the town it is located in with your request; if you are using a web based service such as Yahoo or Hotmail for example, please indicate the town YOU are located in. We will be checking the headers from now on and tracing sending addresses. If the location information you tell us does not match the server ID in the header, we will not respond to your message. We're sorry about this but it is the scammers and frauds that are using the internet to commit crimes that have made these steps necessary. By phone: The Frog Decline Reversal
Project, Inc. can be contacted afternoons and evenings local time on (07)
4045-0373 (+61-7-4045-0373 if you are outside Australia)
(Cairns is
ten hours ahead of London Standard Time; 15 hours ahead of New York ST;
18 ahead of Los Angeles ST - this drops to 9, 14 and 17 hours ahead if
you are on daylight savings time)
Are you contacting us about a sick or injured animal? Please read this section first for useful information when emailing us. For example, problems with animals often take many days to resolve because sufficient information wasn't provided up front, or perhaps your message will be deleted because we don't except html format emails. This section will help you get the best possible reply to your query. Because of the outrageous amount of junk that we receive, we have to keep changing our user name on a regular basis. Please do not add us to your address book - check at the end of this section for the current email contact. 1) We receive emails from many parts of the world asking for help and we try our best to respond but we are very short staffed. If you are in Australia, please phone us instead of emailing. If you are overseas, then email is your cheapest choice but please try to get help from a local vet first. We cannot guarantee any diagnosis unless we see the animal - which obviously isn't possible across the ocean! 2) Please do NOT send your message as html. Please use the PLAIN TEXT option to send your message (your software's Help facility will have instructions how to do this). We have a policy of automatically deleting html format messages because of the volume of spam, viruses and other unwanted visuals that arrive in html format emails. 3) If you are emailing us about a sick or injured animal, we need a DETAILED description - after all, we can't see the animal through the computer screen (unless you send close up, CLEAR jpeg photos!) and long distance diagnosis is a difficult and painstaking process. Please provide the following information in your first email:
4) If you are experiencing problems with tadpoles and are in the US or Canada, you really need local experts to assist with this. There are diagnostic labs run by each state's Department of Agriculture and there are other facilities which can help with mass die-offs in WILD amphibians only. Phone your nearest Fish and Wildlife Service for help in locating government staff that can help. You can also read our detailed tadpole husbandry page to find out if the problem you are having is because the tadpoles are not setup properly. You can also have a look at our "Redlynch" virus page - if you are seeing the symptoms described on that page, we want to know as we are monitoring where that particular disease is turning up. 5) The internet is not really that reliable and we frequently have difficulties with incoming and outgoing emails. People report that their emails to us bounce. If this happens to you, view the source/header of the bounced message and copy the entire source text into a new email to us and try again. Once we have the source text of the bounced message, our ISP can investigate why these emails aren't getting through. Our
email address is currently: curator - at - fdrproject - dot - org - dot
-au
By snail mail: Post Office Box 949, Edmonton, FNQ 4869 Australia By webcam: Yes, we have webcam so we can see your sick/injured frog or toad! We hope that this might help diagnose problems faster and more accurately. However, you will still need to send us an email to arrange for a day and time that we can do the live conversation. We are using Skype and a Logitech Fusion and if you are in North America or Europe, the best time to do the video call is in the morning your time. That would be evening or late night for us. By Visiting: Because of the problems in the rental housing market, our group has been forced to shift to Edmonton - about 20 minutes drive south of the Cairns CBD. We have also had to downsize our facility because of insufficient funding so we will no longer have space for a reception area. We have made arrangements with a centrally located vet practice to receive frogs for us and shuttle them down here to Edmonton. This will be easier for many finders as they will not need an appointment and can drop the frog into that vet clinic anytime during their operating hours. Our receiving station is Balaclava Vet Surgery on the corner of Mulgrave Road and Dalton Street, just one street townward from McCoombe Street. Because of funding problems, we are strictly limited on how many animals we can have in care at one time. We do recommend that you speak to us first before dropping a frog into Balaclava so that we can tell you if we have room here to receive it. Long-distance diagnosis:Because of our lengthy experience with established but especially newer problems that have arisen in frog populations in recent years, we are often able to diagnose these problems even though the frog is not on the table in front of us. Not all problems can be identified this way (such as respiratory issues and gut problems) but many commonly occuring conditions can. To do this however, we will need to ask you for a very detailed background on the ill frog and all the other frogs you have. We will also need to receive a series of photographs via email (or live webcam transmission) which are well lit and very clear. Use the higher resolution (pixel) settings on your camera so that the photos can be blown up and still be clear. A "mug shot" type series should be taken of all six sides of the frog (view from top, view from left with frog sitting on a flat surface - not your hand, view from back, view from underneath (through glass), view from front, view from right). Once we have your email, we will reply via email if the problem is very simple to fix. If a detailed explanation is needed or we have more questions, we will need to speak to you by phone. We can provide our expertise and our time for free but we can't afford to be making 15 to 20 hour-long phone calls per month to all parts of the globe. If we need to discuss your case over the phone, we will tell you when the best time is to ring and we ask that you please ring us at those times. There is only one person here who can do long distance diagnosis and that person is grossly overwhelmed with work. Almost all the problems that we are contacted about will require drugs from a veterinarian or sometimes very specific anti-fungal chemicals which might need to be sourced from somebody half way across town or the state. If you are serious about getting help for your frog, please be prepared to obtain the recommended treatments. There's nothing more frustrating for us than spending several hours helping someone who then doesn't do anything that has been recommended and still emails us to say, "well, thanks, but my frog died" ! Photos can be emailed to: curator [at] fdrproject [dot] org [dot] au and we can be phoned on (07) 4045-0373 after 12:00p Qld time (although after 5:00pm is better).
Last edited: Feb 9th, 2010
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