Revere: Wildlife museum frogs are actually canaries
by C.T. Revere on Nov. 30, 2006, under Local
The International Wildlife Museum is home to transplanted specimens of the endangered Tarahumara frog.
For as long as the keepers of the castle on Gates Pass Road have been in business, they’ve fended off critics by insisting that wildlife conservation is their business.
That’s always been a tough sell, though, given all those dead critters stuffed and posed inside the International Wildlife Museum.
But during a visit to the Moorish rampart west of Tucson earlier this week, the evidence was right there in slimy greenish brown.
A single Tarahumara frog sat just below the surface of the water in a man-made pond outside the museum’s entrance, soaking up what warmth was available on a cool autumn morning.
“A couple of months ago, you would see them lined up. But it’s getting colder now and they’re going to deeper water where it’s warmer,” said Kristine Massey, an educational curator at the museum.
Down in that deeper, warmer water are about 200 of the endangered frogs, waiting to help re-establish a native Arizona species that vanished from the United States 23 years ago.
The frogs, which once thrived in southern Arizona’s mountain streams, were dropped off in the museum’s riparian landscaping in August by state and federal wildlife officers who hope to see them flourish once again.
Cecil Schwalbe, a herpetologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Sonoran Desert Research Station at the University of Arizona, said the frog’s demise was most likely caused by disease linked to the Chytrid fungus, which inhibits the animal’s ability to breathe through its skin and attacks its nervous system.
Water and soil contamination caused by mining operations may have made these and other frogs more susceptible to the fungus, Schwalbe said.
Understanding what decimated the Tarahumara frog populations and returning them to their former habitat is about more than frogs.
“People will say ‘Well, they’re just frogs,’ but we don’t know whether whatever is killing these frogs begins to unravel this aquatic web of life,” he said. “They are the most sensitive canary in the coal mine.”
The native population of Tarahumara frogs began to die off in 1974. The last known native specimen in the U.S. was found dead in the Santa Rita Mountains in 1983.
Two years ago, wildlife officials began bringing frogs and tadpoles from Mexico, returning some to their old croaking grounds in the Santa Ritas and placing others in various locations to prevent disease from wiping out the entire population again.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials chose the ponds outside the museum, at 4800 W. Gates Pass Road, as a way station for some of those frogs.
“We had animals that needed a home, and it was a convenient place to hold them for future release,” said Thomas R. Jones, the amphibians and reptiles program manager for the Arizona Game & Fish Department. “We have supplemented the Santa Rita population two or three times and we will probably use these frogs to do that as well.”
The frogs share their temporary home with other threatened and endangered species.
“We also have the Gila topminnow and the desert pupfish,” Massey said. “They were the original inhabitants.”
Gila chub, an endangered native fish, and a Sonoran mud turtle also live in the pond, which is maintained by museum staff to keep the water healthy.
Working with endangered species seems an odd fit with the main attraction of the International Wildlife Museum – a taxidermic menagerie of animals ranging from bugs to birds to trophies bagged by big game hunters.
That’s what has put off so many since the museum opened in 1988, leading animal rights activists to dub it a “Museum of Death.”
Massey says it all fits into the credo of the museum’s late founder, C.J. McElroy, to promote “conservation, education and preservation.”
“Conservation can be hunting elk in northern Arizona to keep the population healthy, or keeping species like the Tarahumara frog to help preserve the species,” she said.
Working to preserve endangered species has helped to bring more acceptance to a museum that once was under siege like the French Foreign Legion fort it resembles.
“This and the kids,” Massey said. “Kids are so excited when they come here on school trips and they take that excitement home with them.”
Jones said the museum’s contribution to endangered species preservation has been laudable.
“It’s my understanding that part of their mission is education and in this particular instance they are helping us to preserve a rare frog, and by doing that they are putting themselves in a position to educate people.”
And at the same time, helping scientists to understand more about the environment in which we all live.
C.T. Revere can be reached at (520) 573-4594 and at ctrevere@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. His columns run Mondays and Thursdays.
