Today we were working in the lago menor side of the lake,
our first two localities were not so different than before, even in one of the localities
the water was not green anymore, but we noticed a big amount of zooplankton in
the water, probably a normal situation after an explosion of phytoplankton.
We were traveling a lot to try to cover different areas and
at the end of the day we went out by boat just some minutes and when we arrived
to a spot of 3 meters by 2 we were able to find in less than 5 minutes 106 dead
individuals, this with almost any effort just getting with the net the frogs
that were floating in the surface of the lake, but we also noticed that there
were much more individuals under the vegetation, but we did not take all these
animals because was almost night.
With the samples we are collecting until now we saw that
this event caused the death of these forgs from 5 to 10 days but the villagers
told us that before there were much more but they took out those because the
smell was very bad. From all the dead individuals we found we carried out some
post-mortem analysis and we found that most of the dead frogs were females with
eggs and in several cases the frogs had a not normal muddy substance as gut
content.
We are trying to collect as much samples as possible for
future analysis and to try to understand what is causing this problem that it
seems that is associated with the water that arrives in the rivers of rthe
region every rainy season, but talking with the people here they say that is
the first time that this happens at that scale. Also for us it was impressing
to see that amount of dead frogs and even we saw in the past several deaths, we
never saw at this scale.
Tomorrow we are going to start working with the boat in the
area to see how the situation is; also diving in the area to see how is going
in the open areas where normally the frogs are also present.
we hope that with this people and authorities will realize about the real problem we have here in the lake and that the change will come.
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