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Picture a sunny August day in the woods in Minnesota. It's not a day when you'd expect something unusual to happen. That's what a group of middle school students from the Minnesota New Country School who were on a nature-study field trip thought too. But what they discovered at a pond in the woods has alarmed environmentalists across the United States. While they were walking to the pond, the kids caught some of the frogs that were hopping about. At first the class thought that someone had broken the legs on many of the frogs, because the legs weren't bending the way frogs' legs should. Then the students realized that half of all the frogs they had caught were malformed in some way. Instead of four legs, some frogs had three or five. Some had too many feet. Back at school, the students posted their experience on the Internet and also contacted Judy Helgen, a research scientist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Helgen wanted to understand what was causing the frogs to be born with deformities, especially if the cause could be harmful to people too. Like the ripples on a pond when you throw in a rock, the story of malformed frogs got bigger and bigger. When an article about the students and Helgen was published in a local newspaper, people across Minnesota began calling her to report finding malformed frogs. Helgen realized that the problem was much more serious than a few frogs in a little pond in the woods. |
This is a real frog. Its extra leg is one kind of malformation that the North American Reporting Center for Amphibian Malformations keeps track of. |
Other people realized that too. Scientific meetings were held to discuss the frogs. Then the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in North Dakota set up the North American Reporting Center for Amphibian Malformations (NARCAM) to receive reports of frog malformations from anywhere in the United States and Canada. People who found malformed frogs or other amphibians, such as salamanders, could report them to a Web site ( frogweb.nbii.gov/) or could call 1-800-238-9801. Suzanne Fowle, a biological technician, was a coordinator for NARCAM and one of the first people to take reports by phone. She said that a certain number of frogs in the wild are always deformed in some way, but the proportion of deformed frogs that the Minnesota students found was much too high. She explained that if a report of deformed frogs was serious enough, the USGS would send out herpetologists (reptile specialists), toxicologists (specialists in poisonous chemicals), and parasitologists (specialists in organisms like bacteria or insects that live off of other animals) to investigate. Since the USGS asked people to look for deformed frogs in 1997, reports have come from 42 States and 2 Canadian Provinces.
No one has yet explained what's causing the frogs to be malformed, or why, as scientists have recently suspected, many populations of frogs around the world are decreasing. It's not even certain that the two problems are related. Although there could be several explanations for the frog malformations, the most likely causes, according to Judy Helgen, are chemicals in the water where the frogs live and increased levels of ultraviolet radiation, or even a combination of the two. Other possibilities are rising temperatures or harmful organisms, such as viruses, parasites, or bacteria. What worries everyone who deals with the frog problem, however, is what worried Judy Relgen. Could whatever is damaging amphibians harm people too?
You can be a part of the search for malformed frogs. If you see any malformed frogs or other amphibians, visit the Web site to use the online reporting forms. If you do not have access to the Internet, call Jeff Jundt, new coordinator at NARCAM, at the toll-free number listed above. Jundt also invites you to ask him questions about amphibians or reptiles and to visit the new expanding online amphibian identification guide at the NARCAM site.
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This booklet was originally published and printed in 1999. The online edition contains full text from the original publication. Some images have been modified or added to improve the scientific visualization of information. This document has undergone official review and approval for publications established by the National Mapping Division, U.S. Geological Survey.
| Geography | Water | Biology | Geology | U.S. Geological Survey | Dept. of Interior |
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