OR Press: New Woodstock resident fascinated by frogs

[Herp News]

THE BEE (Portland, Oregon) 24 December 09 New Woodstock resident fascinated by frogs (Merry MacKinnon)
Paying property taxes is usually not cause for celebration.
But when 27-year-old Laura Guderyahn bought her house in Woodstock recently, and paid her first property taxes, she was ecstatic.
“I’d been dreaming for years about owning my first house,” says Guderyahn, who is the City of Gresham Watershed Restoration Coordinator.
Guderyahn was also particularly pleased when she heard the “ribbit” of a frog outside her new home. She says she’s glad that, even in Woodstock, there are frogs nearby.
Having set up Gresham's amphibian survey program, Guderyahn knows how to look for frogs. In graduate school she studied malformed frogs, which is why one day in 2007 — while working by a pond next to Gresham's Butler Creek Elementary School — Guderyahn realized that something was odd about the way froglets were moving through the grass next to her feet.
“I could tell something wasn’t right,” she recalls. “The frogs were struggling to hop through the grass.”
When she looked closer, she saw that the young frogs were deformed — encumbered by as many as ten legs.
She took live specimens and shipped them off to Pieter Johnson in Colorado, an expert on frog deformities. He told her they were some of the most malformed frogs he’d ever seen.
After dissecting the frogs, Johnson identified trematodes as the immediate cause of the malformations. According to Guderyahn, Johnson’s research pointed to run-off legacy fertilizers from old farms, and from lawns, as the likely reason trematodes — a flatworm parasite — was proliferating in the frog pond . The run-off created a high level of nutrients in the water, which encouraged algae growth and trematodes.
This past spring and summer, Guderyahn was again out searching for malformed frogs, after being asked to do some follow-up work for Johnson, who himself toured the Pacific Northwest years ago looking for malformed frogs. In the Portland area, Johnson discovered such frogs in Tryon Creek, Aloha Pond, and Spy Glass Pond.
“He wanted me to see if there were still malformed frogs, ten years later,” she explains.
She reported back to Johnson that two of the three sites still had a high number of malformed frogs, and the third site in Aloha had no frogs at all.
“Frogs and amphibians are the ‘canaries in the coal mines’,” she says. “If you’ve got frogs every year for five years and then they’re gone, you know that something unusual is going on in the wetland.”
Meanwhile, Guderyahn is still monitoring the pond at Butler Creek Elementary School.
And she still doesn’t know where that frog she heard croaking near her new Woodstock home lives. But she hopes it’s not a bullfrog, which is a pesky invasive that eats native frogs.
“Do not put your bullfrog in a pond,” she pleads. “Bring it to me.”
And she invites anyone who’s interested to join her in a search for local frogs. “If people know of frog sites in our neighborhood, I’m more than happy to take a family out and look for frogs,” she says. “That's my idea of a good time.”
If you’re interested in taking her up on her offer, Laura Guderyahn can be contacted via e-mail at: lguderyahn@gmail.com.
New Woodstock resident fascinated by frogs