Save The Frogs 2010 Essay Contest Winner Announced!
We are very pleased to announce that the winner of the 2010 SAVE THE FROGS! Essay Contest winner is Josèphe-Anne Rocke, 19, of Verdun, Quebec, Canada! Josèphe-Anne’s essay rose to the top of 45 essays submitted to us by writers from India, Cameroon, Canada, Ghana, Pakistan, Vietnam and the USA.
A World Without Frogs
by Josèphe-Anne Rocke
Show anyone a poison dart frog and even those least appreciative of nature will admit it’s pretty. Then, tell them the species is threatened with extinction and they’ll probably be surprised. I doubt there’s anyone over the age of 3 who doesn’t know what a frog is. They are almost as familiar to us as cats and dogs. Just look around, and you’ll find traces of the amphibian’s popularity. Now, think for a moment about how life would be without them. At first, you might think it wouldn’t affect you (unless you’re a herpetologist), but think again. Amphibian extinction would affect everyone.
You think there are too many flies at your picnic? There would be even more without frogs around. Like seafood? Well, many game fish depend on tadpole populations to survive. No frogs means no fish. And as frogs live both on land and in water, their demise would be doubly catastrophic. The entire ecosystem would collapse!
Contemplating the creatures’ predicament forces us to question ourselves. Frogs are tenacious survivors. If they – with their special skin and unusual ways – are struggling to stay alive in a changing environment, then what about the rest of us? How many frogs have to disappear before we take this seriously? There is a blow to the Earth each time a species is lost. After all is said and done, it comes down to this: a world without frogs would be a world less beautiful, a world less diverse. A world without frogs would be a world incomplete.
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Josèphe-Anne is also an excellent artist, and was a prize winner and honorable mention in the 2009 SAVE THE FROGS! Art Contest:
Category Winner: Toads, Salamanders, Newts and Caecilians
Honorable Mention
January 7th, 2011 at 10:43 am
awesome totally awesome
January 8th, 2011 at 6:14 am
I’m not at all surprised that the numbers are coming out like they are. I am in my 60′s and spent most of my growing years near Lake Ontario and the Oswego River. I have seen all sorts of strange disappearances among fogs and smaller fish, such as perch, sunfish, smelt, and even those stinky mooneyes that once washed ashore. I have been commenting on it for the better part of 35 years. In the months of June & July especially there is a very noticeable change in frog population. Especially an area I called snake swamp road. When the day was very hot, the tarvia on the road running through the swamp got very hot. When it rain briefly during on of these sunny hot days, the smaller green frogs took that opportunity to cross the cooler pavement by the thousands in a matter of a few minutes. Every car that drove by ran over at least 50 or 60 frogs. As the area became more populated and snake swamp became a bit smaller, the automobile traffic increased dramatically. I often wondered when the frogs I used to enjoy watching cross the road would no longer be there. Well, that time came about 15 years ago. I drove out there on a hot sunny day in June. Same as 45 years ago. Just as I was getting close to the road they crossed, it started to rain. Since I now lived out of the area, I thought how lucky I was going to be when I could sit in my car and watch literally tens of thousands of green frogs running across the road again. I sat and waited. Not a single frog showed up to cross the wet cooled off tarvia. I couldn’t believe it. What happened to all those frogs? I told everyone I new about it and I got no more than a few strange looks. “Did you say frogs” I heard so often. “So what” was another. Then I noticed no more mooneyes stinking up the shore or smelt being netted in the middle of the day. The locals told me they had not seen smelt in a number of years. As I thought about it more on the way home, Most of this started with the small fish when we started stocking world record size steelhead, salmon, and lake trout. Their main diet was the smaller fish that were disappearing. What’s next? Real Shame.