|
|
Need to Get In Touch With Us?May 30th: Until sufficient support starts coming in, our rescue activity is suspended. However, if you find a sick or injured frog, you should still CONTACT US to find out where you can bring this frog. Please do NOT phone your local wildlife rescue organisation. These animals require special handling, isolation, and intensive disinfection procedures involving very expensive chemicals. Wildlife carers are not setup to identify or handle the diseases we're seeing in this region's frogs. Don't forget to ALWAYS use gloves or a plastic bag over your hands to pick up frogs. There are a few ways to contact us: Please note: if you are outside FNQ and are contacting us to do a long-distance diagnosis, please scroll to the bottom of this page before you pick up that phone! We have relocated. Please be sure you are using our current contact details - phone (07) 4033-0723 and mail - P.O. Box 1207, Earlville, Qld 4870. 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 email Before you click on that 'compose email' button, please read this section 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 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. 6) If you are an AOL customer and you don't receive a reply from us in a day or two, please keep in mind that AOL occasionally suspends all traffic coming in from Australian servers. It is a laborious process to get fixed (it took more than a month to fix last time it happened) but, as an AOL customer, you can get it fixed a lot faster than us. If you aren't getting replies from us, contact AOL. Our email address is currently: curator - at - fdrproject - dot - org - dot -au (substitute the correct symbols for the at and dot words) By phone: The Frog Decline Reversal
Project, Inc. can be contacted afternoons and evenings local time on (07)
4033-0723 (+61-7-4033-0723 if you are outside Australia) By snail mail: Post Office Box 1207, Earlville, FNQ 4870 Australia By Visiting: The FDR Project, Inc. office is in the Cairns suburb of Mooroobool and this is about 7 minutes drive from the centre of town. Because the group is housed in a private residence, all dropoffs and pickups are strictly by appointment or by telephoning prior to arrival. The address is provided once an appointment is made. Unfortunately we do not have funding to be able to open up a small visitor's centre. 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) 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 or 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) 4033-0723 after 12:30p Qld time (although after 5:00pm is better).
Last edited: Mar. 19th, 2007
|
