Did you know that some frogs are poisonous..and they are the ones that are the most colorful.Because of being poisonous there isn't anything out there that will eat them, so they have become very colorful. They are know as poison dart frogs,there is about 64 species of poison-dart frogs, and they come in many bright colors. But you don't have to worry about them biting you like a snake does.They don't bite..the poison is on there skin and if you handle them you will get the poison on you that way and it will absorb into your skin. But as long as they are handled properly and you wash your hands after doing anything with them they can be fine pets. And keeping and breeding can be very challenging,but with patience the discoveries are endless.

The Indians and other natives use to make darts and rub them on the frogs to get the poison on them then they used the darts in blow guns and killed there enemies that way. That is how they got to be known as poison dart frogs.

In the south east our native frog known as the(red eye) green tree frog is getting close to getting put on the endangered species list. Many things are causing this ..but I hope that they will not become extinct. To many things are...even in this day and age of people being civilized..we still kill off things at a large rate. Will we ever stop destroying and start fixing..I hope so (before there isn't any time left).There are other types of red eye tree frogs andmost of them come from the rain forest. when some of the first pictures of these beauties where shown most people thought it was pictures of ceramic frogs and not real ones.

The red eye green tree frog is also kept as pets like some of the poison-dart frogs,and like them they also will flourish in captivity and readily reproduce.

SOMETHING YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW

In 1990 scientists noted an alarming fact: from California, Colorado and Wyoming to Brazil, Switzerland and Japan, frogs are disappearing. Recognizing that frogs are a 'living barometer' of the earth's environmental health, a number of biologists set out to discover why.

After scientists publicly raised the declining-amphibian alarm, human trade in amphibians . . . increased dramatically. More than four times as many amphibians legally passed through U.S. ports in 1992 as in 1990, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service records.

The tomatoe frog has resently been put on the endangered list, but it is still being sold in pet shops. If you see one of these( picture ) please don't buy it!! And inform the shop of it being on the endangered list, with it just happening they might not know it, and hopefully will stop getting them...not just go up on the price.But if they do react this way you can remind them that having anything on the endangered list is a federal crime.

The increase probably had nothing to do with the alarm, and everything to do with a simple increase in human exploitation to meet a popular demand. People sell frogs for food, pets, purses, and wallets, now more than ever. And consumers continue to buy these products. Like any other predator, people want frogs mostly for food. Many Asian cultures have included frog legs in their diets for centuries--or at least until they have run out of frogs. But the most famous frog-eaters, and the people who inspired frog-eating in Europe and the United States are the French. . . . The preferred frog for the French was their own Rana esculenta, commonly called the green frog or --even more appropriately, considering its fate--the edible frog. But as local demand increased and frog populations declined, the French began moving across Central Europe and then into Turkey, grabbing other large frogs to satisfy their increasing taste for the creature. By 1977 the French government, so concerned about the scarcity of its native frog, banned commercial hunting of its own amphibians. At about the same time, the Central European and Turkish supplies were drying up. None of this, though, stopped the human frog-eaters. So the French and Dutch (a major frog-leg wholesaler) turned to India and Bangladesh for frogs. A combination of efficient refrigeration and dirt-cheap (often child) labor in these countries made it possible to catch frogs, cut off and freeze their legs, and then ship them to Europe and still sell them at a price that made them appealing. "The demand for frog legs surfaced in the United States in various parts of the country . . . . At New York's large Oneida Lake, hunters perfected on style of mass frog-collecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that helped make the area among the most productive in the frogging industry. Each year from July until winter, men and boys would 'tramp the borders of the lake and swamps and upland fields, singly or in small parties, carrying clubs about three feet long,' according to one paper published n 1916. 'The frogs are flushed and as they alight a blow is struck with the club, killing them. Using this rather brutal method, hunters collected three types of medium-size frogs, including leopard frogs, green frogs, and pickeral frogs. A hunter could collect on average six hundred to eight hundred frogs in a single day, although at least one hunter reported taking more than 1,200 during less than six hours of work.

It took about twenty-five to forty Oneida-area frogs to make a pound of frog legs. The legs sold for an average of just over one dollar per pound. It would then, take a whole lot of frogs to make the frog collecting pay off. But even by 1916, frogs in the area were abundant enough to provide a hunter a decent living. One hunting team claimed an annual gross of about $15,000 from frogs alone--very big bucks at that time. They used to literally collect tens of thousands of frogs in a day. Just tremendous amounts of frogs, Hayes says of the Oneida area hunters. You would think it wouldn't take terribly many years to decimate a population, but what was truly amazing about the way they operated was that the population didn't go down very fast. There must have been tremendous populations for them to harvest them as they did. Louisiana and Florida swamplands were also prominent commercial frogging sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But as the technology for catching and storing frogs improved, the number of frogs dropped from overharvesting. Until the 1930s, most commercial frog hunters in the southern swamps used elongated dugout boats that they slowly maneuvered with long poles through the stump-ridden waters. As they moved, they would catch the frogs by hand. There was no refrigeration, so the frogs had to be treated delicately and kept alive, so that they wouldn't spoil before they got to market. This limited the number of frogs a hunter could nab and the amount of time he could spend in the swamps before having to return to shore. These hindrances to mass production kept frogging low enough to prevent any major damage to local frog populations. Things changed in the 1930s, when block ice became available. Suddenly, froggers were free to use spears to nab frogs from the swamp because they could keep the dead animals from spoiling by placing on ice. But what really revoluationized commercial frogging, according to Hayes and Jennings, was the invention of the airboat. Rapidly pushed by an aircraft-type propeller, the airboat allowed froggers to speed through the swamp and cover many miles in a single night's work. 'Commercial froggers expert at airboat use could easily harvest a metric ton of frogs in less than a week, In the absence of any restriction on harvesting, airboat-assisted commercial harvest rapidly depleted frog populations. Commercial frogging peaked in the mid- and late 1930s. Within twenty years the bull-frog and pig-frog populations were so depleted that most commercial harvesting ended.

As happened in France, . . . , American frog-leg fanciers and restaurants turned increasingly to frozen imports. . . . According to figures collected from government agencies by Traffic U.S.A., an arm of the World Wildlife Fund conservation organization, the United States imported more than 6.5 million pounds of frozen frog meat each year between 1981 and 1984. This meat represents only the legs of the frogs, a fraction of their total weight. If you figure that one pair of frog legs weighs a quarter of a pound (a generous estimate), then about 26 million frogs were captured and killed during each of those years to serve the American frog-leg appetite. Ninety percent of those legs came from India and Bangladesh, according to Traffic. In 1987, India banned frog-leg exports after reports that frog-hunting was decimating local populations of Rana tigrina and Rana hexadactyla, the two Indian versions of the bullfrog. Conservationists and one prominent Indian biologist charged that such decimation was causing an increase in mosquitoes and forcing India to become more reliant on expensive pesticides.

Since the India and Bangladesh frog-export bans, Indonesia has become the major exporter of frog legs to the United States and Europe. But no matter what country the legs come from, one thing is usually constant: The legs once belonged to frogs taken from the wild, not from farms. Frogs are nearly impossible to farm economically. . . . in the countries where frogs are commercially harvested from the wild, the harvester gets paid only pennies per frog. No farm can compete with that price.

And if we are tring to stop people from eating them because of there alarming disapearance wouldn't it be also smart to stop disecting them in schools.

Also something very alarming is that scientist that have been watching frogs for years tring to figure out why they are disappearing have also noticed that may places have had what they refer to as "MUTANT FROGS".

I know this might sound like a comic book, but in honesty many of the frogs these days have been born with extra legs or some other strange effect. The cause of this is still not determined but they are sure it's pollution.

But one a more frighting note.....they say that the mutation can effect all life on earth...not just frogs...but with the way frogs effect the environment and the environment effects them that frogs would be the first to show the signs of the harm being done to the planet......so with them now changing and disappearing......its only a matter of time before it effects all of us....and yes that includes humans. So many think that nothing will happen to us...but that is just foolish pride..and people that live with their eyes closed!!





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