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Shining, translucent eggs with little frog embryos await their release. Image courtesy of Ken Bohn/San Diego Zoo.
With Easter around the corner, Southern California biologists are playing bunny and hiding some 300 eggs in the wild.
But these are tiny, gelatinous eggs that belong to Rana muscosa — the mountain yellow-legged frog (also know as the Sierra Madre yellow-legged frog). And biologists are hiding these eggs in a chilly stream in the James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve near Idyllwild, California, in an ongoing, collaborative effort to preserve this endangered amphibian.
On April 14, researchers from USGS and the San Diego Zoo will release these eggs, which were laid by captive frogs at a zoo laboratory 90 miles away. This field expedition is part of a larger USGS-led partnership to study the Southern California population of the mountain yellow-legged frog, which is federally listed as endangered with only 200 adult frogs remaining in the wild.
