Behind-The-Scenes: Turning the Tide on the Frog Apocalypse (Patreon)

In one of our earlier episodes, Can the Frog Apocalypse be Stopped by a New "Vaccine"? , we focused on California scientists applying a treatment for endangered mountain yellow-legged frogs to protect them from a fungus that has devastated amphibians worldwide. 

Once they treated and immunized the frogs, the scientists returned them to their natural habitat in the alpine lakes of the Sierra Nevada. Josh Cassidy, our series cinematographer, and Roland Knapp, a University of California, Santa Barbara researcher, discuss the joys of filming this episode and give an update on the frogs’ state of health.

 Josh Cassidy films a frog release by Spencer Rennerfeldt. 

 Bringing the frogs back home

 Josh: “The really cool part about this shoot was that the researchers were so excited to finally be returning the frogs to the wild. They had grown the frogs from eggs at the San Francisco Zoo, infected them with chytrid fungus, and then killed off the fungus to give these frogs immunity against the fungus in the wild. You could just see their enthusiasm and sense of excitement. I even saw a few tears, that sort of joyful feeling of releasing these frogs back into their home.”

Josh Cassidy (L) and Lauren Sommer (R) working alongside each other. 

Video inconvenienced the radio star 

Josh: “Usually on Deep Look, we’re by ourselves filming with just the researcher. But on this one, Lauren Sommer, who’s the narrator for Deep Look, was also doing a radio story. This was before Lauren came on the team, but she was – and still is – a science radio reporter for KQED. She was also interested in the story, so we decided to travel and hike up with the researchers together. The challenge is that she wants good, clean audio, with no distractions in the background. In a lot of her tape you can hear me asking the researcher to move a little to the left, or hold the frog a little higher, and so we ended up having to go to opposite sides of the lake to do our work. But we made it work.

 A mountain yellow-legged frog released to its natural habitat in the Sierra Nevada in the summer of 2016. 

And how are those frogs doing?

Roland Knapp, UC Santa Barbara: “We don't know yet whether the immunization and reintroduction of frogs in 2016 was successful – this unfortunately takes years to quantify. But I can say that during subsequent surveys at the release sites, we have recaptured and released numerous frogs that were part of the 2016 reintroduction – so we know they are surviving relatively well. The key piece of information that we are still quantifying is whether these frogs are reproducing and offspring surviving at a sufficiently high rate to allow the population to become self-sustaining.”