The Amphibian Foundation's Frog Blog

The Frogs of Colombia exhibit, with some of the plants replaced with endemic plants from the Fuqua Orchid Center. This is a project between me, Becky Brinkman (Orchid Center Manager) and Chris Miller, a new volunteer here and accomplished amphibian exhibit designer. Triolena and a Masdevallia orchid. The orchid is a hybrid as is the Phyllobates terribilis x P. bicolor next to it Phyllobates terribilis and a flowering Masdevallia A cheerful expression on this Phyllobates All three Phyllobates variations on exhibit: Phyllobates terribilis (mint), P. bicolor and P. terribilis (gold) Phyllobates often find a nice perch to claim The Costa Rica exhibit. If you look closely, you can spot at least 2 Agalychnis lemur , the critically endangered Lemur Leaf Frog Agalychnis lemur , with the new Microgamma above his right shoulder A Lemur Frog peeking out behind a new Masdevallia Dendrobates auratus is one of the shyer frogs we have on exhibit...

Williams Bluff. The beautiful release site of head-started Gopher frogs on protected Nature Conservancy land. This week, I had the opportunity to join Dr Maerz from UGA with Robert Hill and David Brothers from Zoo Atlanta to help sample Gopher frogs at the release site in Early County, GA. Gopher frogs ( Lithobates capito ) inhabit burrows but don't build them themselves. They 'share' underground accommodations made by Gopher tortoises, Pocket gophers and mother nature (i.e. tree stumps). It's not easy to find a frog which lives underground ... and this was my first opportunity to use a camera scope (am LED lit camera at the end of a 20' snake) so we could see down these long subterranean  burrows. We were looking for released Gopher frogs that were still making a living at the release site. Dr John Maerz (UGA)  and Robert Hill (Zoo Atlanta) sampling a Gopher tortoise burrow with the camera scope Zoo Atlanta's Robert Hill (top) and David Brot...

(Continued from Part 2, Costa Rica exhibit) Cruziohyla craspedopus | Fringed leaf frog on exhibit at the Atlanta Botanical Garden The Frogs of the Amazon Basin exhibit was exciting to develop. First, it would be displaying one of the most captivating species I had ever read about — Cruziohyla craspedopus | The Fringed leaf frog . We have 2 on display right now, and those are the only two of the species on exhibit — anywhere in the world! There are only 10 individuals in the country, and all of them are here in our amphibian conservation collection, either on exhibit or in our captive breeding lab. Before working at the Garden, I had only dreamed about being in the same room with a Fringed leaf frog. Very little is known about the species due to their rarity and the fact that they live high in the tree canopy in the Amazon rainforest, never needing to come to the ground for anything. If you would like to see this species in the wild ... you have got to get way up in the tr...

The original Frogs of Panama exhibit One of the first assignments in my new role was to design and coordinate the opening of three new frog exhibits for the Fuqua Conservatory lobby. The stand and the 3 aquaria were already being built to replace the current Frogs of the Panama Cloud Forest exhibit. This enormous terrarium (pictured with me, above) was one of the original orchid exhibits, and was showing signs it could not contain a miniature cloud forest much longer. I was delighted to hear that Robert Hill (my predecessor) and Mike Wenzel (plant records guru) had already made some headway into finding plants that would not only be accurate to the regions of which they were depicting, but might also feature plants of focus in our conservatory and conservation collections. We decided the regions we would focus on for the new exhibits would be Costa Rica , the Amazon basin, and of course a downscaled version of our previous Panama exhibit. To be honest, in previous terrariu...