Tell you what I'd like to know in all of this frog controversy...
I've been in the pet biz for years, and a lot of stores sell tadpoles. Almost always, they are Bulfrog tadpoles. I wouldn't let them in my store. Bullfrogs are from the Mississippi basin, non-native to California, and they wipe the heck out of indigenous frog populations here. They're ideally suited to riparian conditions in California.
What do you suppose mom and dad do when the kids' tadpole becomes a Bullfrog?
But when State Fish and Game comes by to do the inspections, they aren't looking for tadpoles. They're busy measuring carapace length on captive bread tortoises to see if they're under 4", or looking to see if we've got Piranhas.
The CA state legislature overreacted to salmonella fears some years ago by banning baby turtles under 4". Never mind that any turtle, or any chelonian, or any reptile can carry forms of salmonella, most of which aren't communicable to humans. I'd always advise parents buying a reptile for the kids, "No kissing the lizard, and always wash hands after handling it. If your kid's not old enough to know to wash his hands after going to the bathroom, he's not old enough for a reptile." You know, common sense.
And common sense combined with good husbandry leads to commercial captive breeding programs that lessen the need to collect pets from the wild. But not if you've got to raise the tortoises for two years to bring them to market, rather than selling hatchlings. We're not even sure right now whether baby tortoises are legal or not, we get conflicting info from Fish and Game.
And Piranhas are banned in CA, even though they could never surve the winters here. There's no chance that these Amazon River fish could establish a breeding population in California. They're just scary, glamorous fish by reputation, though a real bore in the aquarium. Never mind that, some politician somewhere has it on their resume that they saved our kids from Piranhas.
Tell you what, any time you hear about a Piranha being fished out of a golf course pond on the local news, odds are it's just a Pacu, a vegetarian cousin, also from the Amazon. But Fish and Game don't know that. And it's always in Spring or Summer... what a coincidence!
Once I was doing a little work with animal control up in Castaic, just a bit north of L.A. A CalTrans truck comes into the facility with a dead bear they'd hit with one of their trucks. Ooo, a bear! So the local news crews come down, start filming, and ask what kind of bear it is. Since the bear has brown fur, the Animal Control people answer, "A Brown Bear."
I jump in and point out that a Brown Bear is actually a Grizzly Bear, which haven't been seen in California since 1922. The dead bear, I explained, is a Black Bear with a brown pelt. There are different color morphs of the Black Bear. If this was really a Brown Bear, aka Grizzly, this would be huge news, especially considering it was a 165 lb. juvenile, and would have had to have been born here. That would indicate at least another adult male and female Grizzly in the area.
"But it's brown," said the Animal Control folks." It's a brown bear."
I shook my head, and the news crew wrapped and broadcast the story of the Brown Bear killed on a SoCal freeway.
My rambling point is this... the Fish and Game folks and the Animal Control folks often don't know a heckuva lot about the animals they're regulating. They can be just as wrong as the weekend envronmentalists who misidentified the Leopard Frog in the pic you posted.
So, I really wonder about the status of the Red-Legged Frog, and whether or not habitat destruction is the only significant culprit. Bullfrogs are well established throughout California, and I wonder what there populations are over the Red-Legged Frog's former range.
In fact, I'd like to know that about a lot of the missing amphibian species we hear about from time to time.
