Grand Teton National Park

Scientists hope protections help leopard frog return

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July 8, 2009, 2:56 pm
Thirty or forty years ago, on a warm spring night, an observant listener near a wetland in Grand Teton National Park might have heard a sound like a creaky door hinge or a small boat engine.

The sound was the call of a northern leopard frog, and researchers think it hasn’t been heard in the park in at least a decade. In 1995, a child visiting the park found one and showed it to a ranger. The ranger snapped a picture, marking the last definitive evidence of a rana pipiens in the region.

In a place that many wildlife enthusiasts consider the last intact ecosystem in the lower 48 states, the absence of the leopard frog in Grand Teton is conspicuous. But last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the frog could receive Endangered Species Act protection, rekindling hopes among researchers from around the region that the frog could stage a comeback.

Chuck Peterson, a professor of biological sciences at Idaho State University, said amphibian researchers documented the leopard frog at a field station near Moran Junction in Grand Teton in the early 1950s. People also reported the frog at Leigh and String lakes.

“They weren’t an abundant species back then,” he said. 

By the 1970s or early ’80s, the frog was likely on the decline. 

“In 1991, we started looking,” said Peterson. “There was an observation of one. ... up by the Flagg Ranch area in the early 1990s. I’ve gone back [to the park] a couple of times and looked for them.”

The frogs have also declined or disappeared from the surrounding region. Stable northern leopard frog populations used to exist places such as Victor, Idaho. Populations still exist near Ashton, Idaho.