Peril in the Ponds: Deformed Frogs, Politics, and a Biologist's Quest

1. The Call

{ 7 } CHAPTER 1 THE CALL 7 Her voice quavered over the phone as she described a hellish scene: frogs with stumps of legs; frogs missing a leg; frogs with twisted joints; some with extra legs that couldn’t move. A frog with one eye. “Half of these frogs have something wrong. They look really pathetic.” She paused. “We need help.” It was mid-August of 1995 when I first talked with Cindy Reinitz, a teacher who’d taken her students on a nature walk around a pond near Henderson, Minnesota, a community of nine hundred located close to the Minnesota River south of St. Paul. The town was founded in 1852 as a trading center, and today some of its old brick buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Listening to Cindy, I held my breath. Another nightmare in a wetland, I thought, remembering the deformed frogs reported to me two years earlier by a woman who lived in Granite Falls in west central Minnesota. Half of the forty frogs she and her grandchildren had caught in her backyard that summer had deformities, she’d said, expressing concern for the children’s safety. When I visited there, her husband, a burly tree cutter, revealed his fears that whatever harmed the frogs might drive them from their home. “This is the best place in the world to live,” he told me, waving his big hands almost defensively at the woods and toward the dark waters of the Minnesota River flowing close by. { 8 } CHAPTER 1 I knew that ponds were already in peril from pollution and regulatory neglect. And over the decades, thousands of them had been drained to create farmland in rural areas. But now, with Cindy’s alarming report, I wondered, had ponds become too perilous, even for frogs? My mind began to spin. What agents could possibly infiltrate wetlands and disturb amphibian development? Photos of limbless frogs would soon raise warning flags. Were humans also in danger? I doubted that my agency’s administrators would agree to yet another frog project. When the deformed frogs found near Granite Falls were reported to me in 1993, I managed to secure emergency funding from the EPA to investigate the situation the following year. Our bosses went along with it. I was starting to research biological indicators for assessing wetlands health and not getting much support at the agency. Might deformed frogs emerging from ponds help shift their attention to wetlands? The next year (1994) we returned to Granite Falls, collecting and examining hundreds of frogs around the area, including those emerging from the wetland where we’d seen deformed frogs the previous fall. Not one single frog had a deformity. We uncovered multiple sources of possible pollution— transformer oils, a rotten petroleum pipeline, and toxic metals (Gernes and Helgen 1997). And later on, state fisheries biologists measured some toxic chemicals in fish taken from the Minnesota River nearby. But all the frogs looked normal. I suspected that my managers were as puzzled by this as I was. Or perhaps they saw me as overreacting to an aberrant report of deformed frogs. An isolated case. Now, with this new report from the teacher near Henderson, how might my bosses react? See me as raising the alarm again? Crying wolf? It didn’t help that wetlands, prime habitat for frogs, were not a priority at the agency. Not valued like lakes and rivers. I wanted to get to Cindy’s pond immediately, before the frogs dispersed to feed on bugs in upland areas. In 1993 we hadn’t been notified about the Granite Falls frogs until mid-September. We’d found a few with deformities , but by then most frogs had scattered, probably to forage and prepare for winter. But this time we had a chance. It was August. Frogs were at the pond, Cindy said. That week I was committed to work with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to produce a film about the value of protecting wetlands . The EPA, which funded all of my work on wetlands at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), wanted to encourage state pollution { 9 } THE CALL agencies to better protect wetlands water quality. My supervisor, a by-thebooks kind of guy with a background in civil engineering, had tried, unsuccessfully , to stop my participation in the filming, saying our agency’s leadership “had not yet agreed...