I couldn’t let a headline like Air-Dropped Fish Affecting Amphibians go by without reading the article:
Throughout the world, frogs are dying en masse, a phenomenon that concerns scientists because the extremely sensitive amphibians are among the first species to react to wider environmental problems. Global warming, increased solar radiation, windblown pesticides, pollution and diseases all are being explored as possible reasons why the populations are croaking.Yet Vredenburg found a simpler explanation is one major cause: They’re being eaten by trout air-dropped into pristine mountain lakes across the West and in areas as remote as the Andes in South America, on every continent except Antarctica.
It’s not just air-dropped trout — or even just fish:
San Francisco epicureans introduced Eastern bullfrogs a century ago because they liked gourmet frog legs. The bullfrogs have since devastated the population of red-legged frogs thought to have inspired Mark Twain’s Gold Rush-era short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”More recently, voracious northern pike dumped into the northern Sierra’s Lake Davis a decade ago are eating the lake’s trout and costing the state millions of dollars to eradicate.
Late in the 1800s, anglers and hatchery managers began hauling fish into high mountain lakes in modified milk cans lashed to mules. But in the 1950s, wildlife managers discovered they could drop the fingerlings from airplanes, easily seeding thousands of previously inaccessible lakes.
Now thousands of lakes across the West — many of them in designated wilderness areas — are regularly stocked with trout, accounting for about 95 percent of the larger, deeper lakes that once were prime frog habitat.