Students from the Center for Agriculture, Science and Environmental Education (CASEE) in the Battle Ground Public Schools district have been putting their skills to work to track trends in the amphibian populations at a pair of manmade ponds on their 80-acre outdoor learning campus in Brush Prairie.
This year marked the 20th for the annual pond survey, started in cooperation with Charlie
Crisafulli, a research ecologist in the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, stated in a press release by the school district.
CASEE is a half-day science, technology, engineering and math program, offering high school students an integrated curriculum in science and English. Courses include biology, natural
resources, environmental science, forestry, wildlife, chemistry, agroecology, microbiology, agricultural and industrial biotechnology and four years of high school English, the district stated.
Crisafulli was in attendance on May 8, along with other area scientists for the event and answered questions from students at a morning and afternoon session. Students also presented their research to those in attendance.
Crisafulli’s main research focused on the initial and longer-term ecological responses of organisms in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems following the May 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helens to 2023. Since 2009, he has conducted field investigations at several contemporary eruption sites in Patagonia, Chile, a program for the amphibian summit stated.
“CASEE had a really interesting faculty as well as student body, and it just seemed like an outstanding opportunity to bring methods that we’re using at Mount St. Helens down to CASEE,” Crisafulli said. “I don’t think any of us could have ever imagined back in 2006 that we would be looking at 20 years of continuous data and so it was such an outstanding opportunity and today it’s just remarkable to be here and seeing the students working on not just the current year data but taking this more historical perspective and looking the data through the years.”
Crissafulli added that the students from CASEE will and have been hitting the ground running upon graduation with the knowledge that they gain in the program.
The collection of data from overtime was analyzed and presented at a special all-day amphibian summit at CASEE on Thursday, May 8.
CASEE Instructor Irene Catlin said the idea to start the survey was due to the presence of the non-native, invasive, problematic American bullfrog.
“We started seeing these bullfrogs and were very curious about how they were affecting native, endemic salamanders and frogs,” Catlin said. “We were also just curious about what was in the pond and what was the presence and absence of amphibians and how that would change over time with the non-native bullfrog.”
The two ponds at the CASEE property began with six different amphibians, and now the populations have dwindled to mostly one, the northwestern salamander, Catlin said. The American bullfrog lives on at the ponds despite their best efforts to remove the species.
“There’s a real problem with decreasing richness in biodiversity,” Catlin said. “I mean, ecosystems have become really susceptible to disease, and the health goes down. There’s a lot of issues with that, but, you know, we have been removing bullfrogs and we still see quite a few and we haven’t seen a return of native species, so we’re not really sure why. So there’s lots of questions.”
Crisafulli said the change in species diversity is perplexing.
“It’s clearly more than just the bullfrog in all likelihood,” he said. “But then there’s a whole suite of potential hypotheses that could be the underlying culprit for this. But the data speak for themselves. I have no question about the quality of the data there, it is a true trend.”
The annual amphibian survey takes about two months, Catlin said. She explained the program starts with a month of training and background on amphibians in order to learn the morphology and understand the species and protocols to measure correctly and identify the different stages of life they come across in the ponds.
“The study itself lasts about four weeks,” she said. “So we set traps one day, we let them sit 24 hours, and we go out and then they empty the traps and they start identifying species, life stage, if it’s an adult, whether it’s male or female. They measure a couple of different measurements on the amphibian or the salamander. They measure snout to vent, total length. We actually clip tails because it’s a mark recapture study, just so we can get a little bit more accurate count for population.”
