Ponds in northern Florida are naturally quite acidic, according to Penn State graduate student Susan Warner who, with her adviser, Bill Dunson, received a grant from the Florida Freshwater Fish and Game Commission to study the state's frogs. Acid rain has been suspected as a culprit in the animals' decline, but few data exist on herps' tolerance to acid waters. Since the late 1980s, biologists around the world have noticed a decline in "herps" (what enthusiasts call amphibians and reptiles from the Greek herpeton, "creeping thing"). ![]() Which makes the ponds around Tallahassee a good place to find out what acid rain may do to frogs. Even south Florida, with its more uniform habitat, is outdone. There are more types of frogs in northern Florida than anywhere else in the United States. They wait, sometimes until 3 a.m., while the listening females come hopping, crawling, clambering to their sides they couple, spilling their gelatinous eggs like marbles into the pond, like films onto the water surface, like thickened soap-bubbles among the reeds, or like hardened drops of dew stuck to the undersides of leaves. In puddles, ponds, surrounded by sand and pines, the males send up their idiosyncratic bleats, chirps, choruses, or trills. ![]() On rainy summer nights in Florida, the frogs come out to breed.
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