{"id":14190,"date":"2021-05-06T09:17:32","date_gmt":"2021-05-06T14:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildlifepreservation.qa.caorda.com\/blog\/?p=14190"},"modified":"2023-05-02T12:39:47","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T17:39:47","slug":"counting-tadpoles-one-two-skip-a-few-ninety-nine-20-thousand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildlifepreservation.ca\/fr\/blog\/counting-tadpoles-one-two-skip-a-few-ninety-nine-20-thousand\/","title":{"rendered":"Counting tadpoles – one, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, 20 thousand!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u00a0The\u00a0Oregon spotted frog\u00a0<\/a>is Canada\u2019s most\u00a0endangered<\/a>\u00a0frog, with fewer than 300 breeding individuals in the wild.\u00a0The recovery plan for Oregon spotted frog calls for\u00a0conservation breeding<\/a>,\u00a0headstarting<\/a>\u00a0and release to re-establish viable populations in at least six sites. Wildlife Preservation Canada began coordinating these efforts in 2010, adding a\u00a0conservation breeding<\/a>\u00a0program to the\u00a0headstarting<\/a>\u00a0work taking place at the Greater Vancouver Zoo. This expanded on the breeding efforts underway at the Vancouver Aquarium.
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Three staff from the Oregon spotted frog recovery team spent five days counting tadpoles, coming up with a whopping 20,514 tadpoles! (Give or take a few – you can see how this could be a difficult task!)
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We had amazing success with our egg laying females this year with 41 out of 43 successfully laying their eggs! (Read more about how we helped this happen, what we changed and our ideas why here<\/u><\/a>). This is great for our program. It means we have learned at the very least the \u201chow\u201d portion of getting females to release their eggs, even if the \u201cwhy\u201d is yet to be determined. Getting females to lay their eggs means that we will be able to minimize the number of females with egg binding, where the females retains their eggs through the end of the breeding season. Egg binding either results in infection and ultimately death or would require risky surgery which renders the females sterile. Getting eggs out of the females reliably was step number one.<\/p>\n

Now, we dream bigger! What if those eggs are actually fertile? In the past we have had poor fertility in the captive program, with most clusters under 10% fertility. This means that in a typical year, even if we get 30+ egg masses we would see only around 2000 tadpoles. When we are looking at breeding endangered species low fertility could be caused by on overwhelming number of factors.<\/p>\n