By: Jose Galvan
Biological Sciences building on the Georgia Southern, Statesboro campus, where interviews were held
The Cuban Tree Frog is an invasive species, native to Cuba that eats just about anything that can fit in it's mouth. It has inhabited parts of Florida and has been recently reported on being sighted in Savannah. With an invasive species that can grow to the size of your hand and eat anything it wants, as well as having it's mucus be highly irritable to the skin, one has to ask, how bad is this going to be for us? Are they actually cannibals? Are we able to prevent it? How would it look like if it came to Bulloch County, or Georgia Southern? After a couple of interviews with some researchers of said frog, it might already be too late.
Raymond Kidder is a recent Master's Graduate from Georgia Southern, currently the Life Sciences Program Coordinator for the university, and studied the Cuban Tree Frog in Louisiana. Kidder studied the diets of the frogs, finding out that it really is everything. On top of the normal frog diet, they do, on rare occasion, eat small vertebrates, including their own. Kidder spoke about the effects of places where the frogs invaded. The Cuban Tree Frog competes very well in any environment its in, due in part to its large size, and in turn, displaces any native species in competition. As well, Kidder spoke about the movement patterns, and what the possibility of it is in Bulloch. They've stemmed from horticultural movement, like palms out of Florida, and places with many people, so it wouldn't be too wild to assume they would be popping up here, but Kidder brought up the theory that it's unlikely due to the frog's thermal tolerance, and that Statesboro has enough freezes to stave off for a good while, but as the Earth gets warmer, the possibility increases, or that the frog can slowly adapt.
This differs a little from the findings of Michael Brennan, a Biology Master's student and a wildlife technician for the Jekyll Island authority, who said he already found the frog in Bulloch, in the S&S Greenway. Brennan suspects the disappearance of a native tree frog in Jekyll could be tied to the arrival of the Cuban Tree Frog, though the population there was already scarce prior. Brennan also brought up that in places like Florida, where the frog has been for decades, the native frog is already gone, in failure to compete with the Cuban Tree Frog. With the disappearance of these frogs, it affects local snakes and other frogs that have native tree frogs in their diets, and can't be replaced with the Cuban Tree Frog due to its irritable mucus. While not extremely present, as the years go on, they'll become more common. Brennan talked about "citizen science" and the importance of reporting any suspicious frogs to the Biology department in hopes of deterring the invasiveness.
The problem when it comes to trying to combat invasive species, though, is that it's extremely hard to detect them until they're born. You can't just find a pile of eggs and decide to crush them, and if you see a couple of Cuban Tree Frogs, there might be egg lays somewhere with thousands of eggs as Kidder mentioned.
Not all hope is lost fighting off the Cuban Tree Frog, but if we do lose, maybe save a local frog or two.
