![]() ![]() The first was that the frogs were being exposed to some type of deforming pollutant. Two hypotheses immediately presented themselves. And once the news got on the Internet, deformed frogs, soon found all over Minnesota, started popping up in other places as well. But the literature also demonstrated that what was going on in Le Sueur County was of entirely new order of magnitude. Frog deformation does happened quite naturally. Deformed frogs have not been all that uncommon. It just took a French Canadian to make it available to language deprived American scientists. It took awhile to dig out, but the literature is there. In A Plague of Frogs, William Souder, who covered Minnesota’s deformed frogs for the Washington Post, reviews that scientific hubbub following the discovery in Le Sueur County. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency was called into to view the spectacle, and soon the scientific community was in a hubbub. Open the mouth and there’s the other one. ![]() A group of middle school children visiting an environmental learning center in Le Sueur County, Minnesota, found an entire population of leopard frogs suffering from all kinds of horrid deformities. It is a fact that frog populations are in decline everywhere, even in pristine environments where we haven’t yet pulled our ugliest stunts.īut on August 8, 1995, the frogs’ saga took a nasty turn. They’ve survived astronomical catastrophes, drifting and colliding continents, glaciations, and mass extinctions of all sorts. They seem well adapted to anything nature wants to throw at them. They’ve evolved ingenious techniques for surviving serious cold and heat and drought. They are essentially funnels with a big mouth at one end, and at the other, big legs to escape predators with. They’ve been around for 350 million years, and that’s a while.
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