Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Woohooo, sumac........ That planet sounds really good. But at that size we would weigh about 400 pounds each. Gotta adapt. Eventually, if on the planet, we would be approx two feet high, by our earth standards. But, after all, then every other thing on the planet would be smaller also and we would hardly notice. More gravity means smaller stuff - Less gravity means bigger stuff. They aren't compatible. The big stuff would be crushed on the larger planet. And the small stuff from the larger planet would tend to float off in a slight breeze.

Gotta be careful where we set our feet.

Also, love the Antartic story.

Not to worry Stradee.......... I just looked at your FaceBook pics.

Hey, I have a 1972 Ford Ranger truck that runs really good. It's the grand-daddy of the F-150 series. I call it my "beater truck" because I can throw rocks at it and if I hit it I don't care........... haha ---- Big Grin ----- Because I'd never do that.

Saw the photos, and yep...there's water

Happy Fiftyith Fred, Wilma, and BamBam (Ethel n' Barney n' Pebbles too) oops, can't forget Dino

You are to cute, dan

The Ranger sounds awesome! Still a super vehicle for chores or just taking a drive to town...very proud of you dan for not hurting the Ford.

reading along and clicking

Very proud of you ehBeth. But, you started me on this trip. It's been a good one.

Thanks.

Ohhhh my goodness, Stradee........... You are making me blush and I don't do that often.

Thanks.

Still ablushing and looking outside at a tree asmiling...........!

We have more trees asmiling all around the world.

Even if this isn't the ONLY world in the universe!!!! Thanks sumac. You did good.

Glad you enjoyed the articles, Danon. They were interesting. It is a beautiful fall day here with sun out and temps in the mid-70's. Loving it. All clicked.

Great your are having sun shine -- I have been looking at your area and thought you may be under water?? Glad you aren't!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe my rain dances and Stradees helped??

We're in Kingston, visiting hamburger/hamburgboy. Gonna go to a fish fry at the church hall in half an hour. Good to spend a little time in the old hometown.

Well girl, you have your rain and i hope the drought is finally ending!

Blushing is good for the skin, dan

Weathers still beautiful, sunshine and breezy.

Hmm, not certain we should be rain dancin' for a few more weeks till the floods subside...and be sure we have the correct latitude and longitude! So much to remember when saving the planet.

Well me loverlies, time to finish me chores for the day.

Please give Mr Hamburger our best.

Have a fab day, Beth

a very different weather day

rain last night, more sprinkles today w/ balmy tropical temps

Niners lost a heartbreak of a game today...sigh

tonight though? more football

have a good evening all

You too, sweetie --- Stradee!!!!!!

The coast got hammered with 23 inches and there is flooding, and deaths in NC. But I sit high and dry and am ready for some more rain. So dance, everyone.

All clicked and ready for a cool day. We probably won't get up to 70.

Glad you had some rain but not the flooding --- I was worried about you.

Good morning and Good clicking all you Wildclickers............

Now i'm blushing!!!!!!

Hadn't seen the news, sue. Very sad for the coast, but glad you're ok...

Dancin'

This may be the disease that is killing all the frogs in the rainforests.


ctober 4, 2010
Toiling to Save a Threatened Frog
By ERICA REX
SEQUOIA AND KINGS CANYON NATIONAL PARKS, Calif. — From the summit of Bishop Pass in the Sierra Nevada, elevation 11,972 feet, all you can see are miles of granite peaks against the sky. There is no traffic and no pollution. The natural world seems pure and unspoiled.

But appearances are deceiving. Over the last decade, disaster has struck in the form of chytridiomycosis, or chytrid, a deadly fungal disease that has driven at least 200 of the world’s 6,700 amphibian species to extinction. One third of the world’s frogs, toads and salamanders are threatened. Forty percent are declining. Chytrid’s arrival has laid waste to the indigenous Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, Rana sierrae.

In Dusy Basin, a remote glacial valley in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks a few miles west of Bishop Pass, Vance Vredenburg, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, is conducting an experiment he hopes will help preserve what remains of these once abundant creatures. Dr. Vredenburg and his colleagues are inoculating chytrid-infected frogs with a bacteria, Janthinobacterium lividum, or J. liv, that does not prevent infection with chytrid but can help frogs survive.

Dr. Vredenburg, Reid Harris of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., and colleagues found the symbiotic bacteria on several amphibian species. Lab experiments last year showed that J. liv produces a metabolite, violacein, that is toxic to the chytrid fungus. Dr. Vredenburg wants to see how effective the treatment will be in the wild.

Even before chytrid arrived, the Sierra frog population had been severely reduced by the California Department of Fish and Game’s practice of seeding high-elevation lakes with hatchery-raised fingerling trout for the sport fishing industry. Chytrid has hastened the destruction. Dr. Vredenburg and colleagues counted 512 populations scattered among the thousands of mountain lakes in the park in 1997. In 2009, 214 of these populations had gone extinct. A further 22 showed evidence of the disease. It is a far cry from the early 1900s, when frogs in the region were so common that lakeside visitors reported trampling them underfoot.

Dr. Vredenburg, 41, has been doing frog research in the Sierra since the mid-1990s. He chose frogs as research subjects because he wanted to do “basic science that could be applied toward solving some real-world problems, like the biodiversity crisis. Once your study animals start dying, believe me, you pay attention!” At the time, he said, “I saw many scientists as living and working in a bubble. Besides,” he added, “I like catching frogs.”

For his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, under the mentorship of David Wake, Dr. Vredenburg measured the effects introduced trout were having on mountain yellow-legged frog populations. The results were clear: They wreaked havoc. Brown and rainbow trout, not native at higher elevations, are voracious consumers of tadpoles. In 2001, as a result of work by Dr. Vredenburg and Roland Knapp of the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory, the state fish and game agency and the National Park Service began a gill netting project to remove them. In areas where trout were removed, frogs recovered.

Curtis Milliron, a senior biologist at the fish and game department, pointed out that historically the agency has played a dual, sometimes paradoxical role. “We’re both ecological stewards and recreational purveyors,” Mr. Milliron said. Although his agency is implicated in frog decline, now his charter is to create “a biodiversity management plan where we can maintain frog habitat and implement frog recovery.”

Leaders at the National Park Service, too, once felt that “we need to protect the national parks from research scientists,” said David Graber, chief scientist for the service’s Pacific West region. Scientists’ agendas were viewed as being at odds with the service’s mandate, which calls for conservation and preservation as well as making parks available for recreation. “Now it’s different,” Dr. Graber said. “Now all we care about are the massive frog die-offs. We’re passionate about conservation. We can’t wait for ‘survival of the fittest.’ ”

Dr. Vredenburg himself was “speechless” when the park service granted permission to carry out the J. liv experiment in Dusy Basin. “Then I had to start planning,” he said.

Dr. Vredenburg chose Dusy Basin for his experiment because chytrid is just arriving here. Unlike Sixty Lake Basin several miles to the south, where frogs went extinct within four years of the arrival of chytrid, Dusy Basin still has frogs. Biologists do not know what first brought chytrid to the Sierra. But Dr. Vredenburg’s research showed that chytrid spreads in a linear wave across the landscape, an infection pattern like that of human epidemics. Infection levels start out light, then increase to very high. Then there is a mass die-off.

In July, Dr. Vredenburg and his students captured and tagged 100 frogs, apparently the last remaining here, with transponder tags. They weighed and measured frogs, and they recorded the tag numbers using an electronic reader. The experimental group contained 80 frogs; 20 were designated controls. Dr. Vredenburg and his students placed experimental frogs in plastic containers for an hourlong bath in cultured J. liv — long enough for J. liv to colonize on frogs’ skins. They released the frogs into the ponds and streams where they had been captured.

The fieldwork suits Dr. Vredenburg, who grew up in Texas and Mexico but looks like a classic blond California surfer. When he was in graduate school, he would often leave Berkeley after work, drive to a 10,000-foot-elevation trailhead, hike 16 miles to a research site carrying 80 pounds of equipment and set up camp before calling it a day.

Before graduate school, Dr. Vredenburg spent three years working as a research diver in the Antarctic. He spent a year studying the effects of rampant cattle grazing on native trout in the Golden Trout Wilderness area south of Mount Whitney. He traveled to India to study Buddhism, considering becoming a monk. “I got the acceptance letter from Berkeley in New Delhi,” he recalled. “I wasn’t sure what I should do. I went to talk to my teacher, who seemed to think I’d already made up my mind.”

Early in September, Dr. Vredenburg made his last trip of the season to Dusy Basin to see how the frogs were faring. At this elevation, snowfall often starts right after Labor Day, and the lakes start to freeze over. The yellow-legged frogs hibernate beneath the ice for eight months of the year.

Dr. Vredenburg spent two days catching frogs, weighing them, checking to see if they were experimental or control animals, and treating them. He found several that had not been tagged.

He found one untagged female in a puddle beside a lake. He held her outstretched in his hand and pointed to her yellow underbelly and the bright yellow-orange of her legs. “I can smell garlic on her,” Dr. Vredenburg said. “Many frogs species have defensive compounds that smell like garlic.” He swabbed her belly, her thighs, her toes and the webbing between her feet. “This gets a layer of skin where I can detect both microbes,” he explained. Later in the lab, he would extract DNA from the swab to verify the presence of the protective J. liv bacteria.

By Sept. 2, Dr. Vredenburg had caught 43 frogs: 33 that had been treated with J. liv previously, one control — previously tagged but untreated — and eight brand new, which he treated. Frogs inoculated earlier in the summer were surviving.

Several weeks later, Dr. Vredenburg had results from the lab: all the frogs caught in early September were infected with chytrid. The inoculated animals had the lowest levels of infection.

The real test for these frogs, though, is not their current level of infection but whether they survive the winter, and whether the juveniles undergoing metamorphosis from tadpole to frog can withstand the disease.

Dr. Vredenburg is hopeful about his experiment, but like many of his colleagues he is not at all optimistic about the future of amphibians.

“There are still places in the world where chytrid hasn’t shown up yet,” he said, “like Madagascar. But it will. It’s just a matter of time.”