expedition to Titicaca lake

As you may know last week we had bad news about the situation of the frogs in Titicaca lake, now after some planning with the team of the project and some organizations and government we are now getting ready to go to the field and to see what is happening, to evaluate the real status of the frogs and also to take different kind of samples such as water quality, heavy metals, different tissues for different kind of analysis that can provide us a clue that can explain why the frogs are dying in the Lake.

the next days we will update our blog once a day so we can share the findings of this expedition, we more than welcome suggestions and comments about this

getting ready for the fieldwork in Titicaca Lake 

There is something wrong with the lake

Dead frog in one of the localities of Titcaca lake

Working in the lake the last years, allowed us to see some changes and events. This is the case of the dead frogs that we were finding all the time, but now we  this phenomenon is much more common, even in areas that seems to be in good conditions. Now everytime we monitor the lake we find more dead frogs.

Dead Titicaca water Frog and Titicaca grib

We are studying and tryingto understand what happens in the lake, and we found some clues that show us a synergy among different factors such as a fungal disease that arrived to the lake a couple of years ago and pollution of the water, where some areas the situation can be very bad.

Monitoring the deaths of the Titicaca water frog

Since January 2015 we were able to witness some changes in the lake, we found that one of the areas pollution is increasing, more dead frogs are found, macroinvertebrate structure is changing among others. Some time ago we found dead frogs in big numbers and all at the same time, now these last months we found the same thing but not just that, now the water is completely green, not being possible to find our traps during our dives or frogs under the water…
Now we can see in the news that more people are talking about this problem
Erbol, Los tiempos, la razon, and we hope this situation will change.

Green color of the water in all the "Lago menor", photo January 2015

All the local communities around the “Lago menor” were talking about this phenomenon, where the water turned completely green. And there are a lot of dead frogs and also no fish anymore. There is something happening in this area and we need to change things. We see now the first signals that there are problems in the lake, factors that are affecting not just to a critically endangered species, but also to local communities who are having problems to find fish that is one of their main resources.

water of one of the localities that is completely green,

photo January 2015

Nature tell us very clear that something is wrong and we need to act now, otherwise this will have a bad end, Fortunately local communities realize that this phenomenon is not normal, they want to change this situation and we think that we need to help them to understand the situation and also to try to take actions at different levels to prevent this kind of problems.