Boreal toad collecting

[Evan Jamison]

I work at an aquarium, and we are opening a new exhibit hall that will display a bunch of threatened and endangered Utah aquatic animals. I was lucky enough to go on the excursion to collect our boreal toad egg masses last week, and thought I would share some pics.

I went out with some Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) officers to survey a few sites in the Monte Cristo range in Northern Utah. All the sites we visited were above 8000 feet. Here are a couple habitat shots.





It was absolutely beautiful up there. There were still many snow drifts across the rut-filled dirt road. Vegetation was mainly stands of pine and aspen, with a lot of open fields of wildflowers. All the ponds that have toad populations are from springs, and the water temp was about 55-60 degrees F. There were also many neotonic tiger salamanders inhabiting these ponds.

We ended up capturing 9 adult/subadult toads, and all but one female were recaptures (they PIT tag all adult captures). We also captured 8 juveniles. Weight and measurements were taken, and all were re-released.




We finally found what I had gone out for in the first place at the last survey site, eggs!!!



When the eggs strands are laid, they are much more conspicuous (you can see each individual egg as a black spec in the strand), but as they mature, algae grows over the strand and it becomes quite hard to find. You can see some tadpole starting to hatch in the above pic.

There was another egg mass in very shallow water that had hatched a couple days earlier.


The water temp. at the eggs was about 20 degrees F warmer than the water in the middle of the pond, and there were probably around 8000 tadpoles in 10 square feet. Sadly, only 8-10 out of that are likely to survive to adulthood. I ended up collecting 200 eggs, and 20 or so tadpoles to raise up and use for exhibit and our outreach program.

I wish I had had more time to go out flipping rocks looking for rubber boas while I was up there, but I needed to get the eggs back to their new home.

Thanks for looking!

-Evan

[daniel1983]

Pretty cool Evan! Keep it comin'

[CTReptileRescue]

That's great Evan
That sounds like an adventure our family would be thrilled to accompany you on. Good times!
Glad to see you got the eggs. Let me know how they do.
Rusty

[jglass38]

Great pictures Evan!!

[JLC]

Awesome pictures! What a cool adventure!

[Pork Chops N' Corn Bread]

Very cool. Looks like a fun project there. I would love to see more pics of them when they finish their morphing

[JLC]

Very cool. Looks like a fun project there. I would love to see more pics of them when they finish their morphing

When they finish morphing? I'd love to see pics OF them morphing! LOL That is just so awesome! The petstore where I buy my feeders from has some "water dogs" which are Tiger Salamanders in the morph stages....really freaky looking, like something from another planet....SO cool!