An unexpected meet up with David Bickford

While travelling in California conducting fieldwork on Xenopus, I was contacted by David Bickford with respect to a chapter that we have been working on for what seems like a very long time. I remembered that David worked in the LA area, and so I reached out to him to meet up. In the pic below, David is showing off all of his Mandica memorabilia. He and Mark were lab mates for a while in Miami.

As David was about to move house, he had plenty of space and so I stayed a few nights with him and side-kick Datsie. Anyone who knows David will know that it was great fun to spend time with him, and we found time to drop traps at some of the best places that LA has to offer. Here are some of the highlights:

Trapping at a known site in Corona, Orange County. We didn't catch any Xenopus, but we did meet some interesting characters who hang out under the bridge. 

Another fun hang-out in the Jurupa Valley near Riverside. No appropriate trapping places here, but David shows us how he can make his lower half disappear.

Although David and I had no success in Orange County, I hope that there maybe a sample to come from there in future. There are certainly enough dodgy spots for our Xenopus to hang out in.

The lush and leafy suburbs of Washington are invaded

Unlike the dry canyons of San Diego, Washington State is a very green place with endless forests of trees, and plenty of water cursing through creeks out to the sea. In 2015, the first records of African clawed frogs started coming in from a stormwater pond in Bothell, WA. Two boys were fishing and saw an unusual looking frog moving in the water. The same year, in another stormwater pond in Lacey, WA more Xenopus  were found. The two invasions appear unrelated other than a change in the legislation at the time that advised people that anyone keeping these (and other) potentially invasive animals as pets would require a special permit and meet biosecurity conditions. The result seems to be that the animals were dumped and the invasion started. By 2019, another site (Issaquah, WA) to the south of Bothell was found to be teaming with Xenopus. Another invasion, or animals travelling through creeks and lakes? 

  I've been in contact with the good people of DFW Washington State since the start and we have had many email exchanges and discussions about how best to tackle these invasions. However, the area is full of stormwater ponds and creeks that connect them, so appears ripe for continued invasion. 

I was given lots of help in Washington by Reed Ojala-Barbour (Jen and Al) who came to show me all the sites. Max Lambert was also hugely helpful, traffic delays aside, we had a successful day out in Issaquah. Other helpers in Lacey were Megan Friesen and Mark from Saint Martin’s University (Lacey) who kindly allowed me to use their lab space.  

One of the really special treats for me was to see Xenopus laevis in the same traps as Ambystoma gracilis. These two species would never naturally meet, but have some interesting similarities.

Further Reading: 

Field work to catch African Clawed frogs in San Diego

San Diego has the world's oldest extant invasive population of African clawed frogs, Xenopus laevis. I visited briefly in the summer of 1995 when I was doing my PhD studies, and successfully trapped in Tecolote Canyon and a pond in Spring Valley (Avocado) where I captured large numbers of individuals. 

The creeks in the San Diego canyons yielded large numbers of X. laevis  on this trip.

It was also great to revisit Tecolote Canyon with Alina and Tyrone who have been working there for the past 15 years or so. Now looking much better than it did in the 1990s, Tecolote Canyon is home to a thriving population of African clawed frogs. 

Thanks so much to Carla, Tyrone, Alina, Olivia and Lin for all their help in making this trip such a success.

Introducing aSCR to the San Diego Zoo

While in California this July, I was asked to give a talk on some of my work for a weekly meeting of the San Diego Zoo staff. I chose to talk about aSCR because of the relevance it has to monitoring threatened species. 

There was a good turnout and some great questions after the talk. The zoo has a great presentation room with a nice sound system on which we could listen to the calls of South African frogs. 

It was great to give a talk on aSCR again and reflect on how much we have achieved with this technique over the last 10 years. 

Measey, J. Counting chirps. Acoustic monitoring of threatened frogs in South Africa's fynbos. San Diego Zoo. 13 July 2023

Carla Madelaire at the San Diego Zoo

While visiting San Diego this month, I ceased the opportunity to visit Carla Madelaire in her new position at the San Diego Zoo. Carla's new position as researcher in the Frozen Zoo is a fascinating blend of laboratory experiments into the physiology of cell-lines indicating responses of whole organisms to phenomena such as climate change. Carla has literally hundreds of cell-lines for different species of vertebrates in the Frozen Zoo. 

Many of you will remember that Carla spent some time in the MeaseyLab in 2019 when she was a post-doc with Fernando Gomes (and visited together with Adriana Barsotti - see blog post here). I later caught up with Carla again in Brazil at the herp conference (see blog entry here). Carla worked on dehydration and stress in toads and still has a keen interest in these subjects.

It's going to be fascinating to see what Carla does in her new job. Really looking forward to future collaborations.