Monday November 18, 2024
Recordnet.com —
The jewel-like lakes of the High Sierra in Yosemite National Park are awe-inspiring sights. But for more than a hundred years they’ve also been biologically disrupted, stocked each year with non-native fish, which in turn destroyed the population of Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that once covered their shores and filled their depths.
With that loss, the entire ecosystem shifted. The frogs had once been an important part of the summer diet of not only bears, coyotes and snakes but also multiple bird species, including the Clark’s Nutcracker and the Gray-crowned rosy finch.
Then the few frogs that survived were almost wiped out by the arrival of the dreaded amphibian chytrid fungus, which killed them off in the few fish-free lakes that remained.
“It was a double whammy that almost wiped out the species,” said Roland Knapp, a research biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been studying them since 1995.