New study looks at requirements for Table Mountain Ghost Frog tadpoles
In a new study, published today by MeaseyLab alumnus Zishan Ebrahim and colleagues, they determined the requirements of the tadpoles of Table Mountain Ghost Frogs, Heleophryne rosei. The iconic Table Mountain Ghost Frog only lives in the streams and kloofs around Table Mountain and nowhere else on the Cape peninsula (or anywhere else in the world). Previously, researchers had determined that the tadpoles require perennial flow (streams that don't dry) in order for the tadpoles to inhabit them. This then is the reason why Table Mountain is the only massif on the peninsula with the frogs. However, in a paper published today, Zishan Ebrahim shows that the frogs also have a sweet spot of temperatures above (and presumably below) which they can't tolerate.
Zishan monitored physical parameters of Table Mountain's stream water for many years finding that tadpoles don't inhabit all of the streams with perennial flow on the mountain. The warm water that flows down some of the streams could be influenced by the complex hydrological installations on top of the mountain that were originally installed to supply fresh water for the city. Now much of the water on top of the mountain sits in dams where it heats in the sun and may influence the temperature in the streams. There are other problems on Table Mountain, most notably invasive trees, that are also likely to change the hydrological properties of the water and impact on the Ghost frogs and their tadpoles.
Read more about the conservation relevance of this work in this recently published paper:
Ebrahim, Z, de Villiers, A. and Measey, J (2020) Assessing water conditions conducive to tadpoles of the Table Mountain Ghost Frog (Heleophryne rosei) and the relevance to their conservation Koedoe Vol 62 (1): a1581 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/koedoe.v62i1.1581
