|
| |
To listen to soundfile: click on the headphones icon
To download soundfile: click on the mp3 file name
|
|
| |
Dr Arthur White, president of the NSW Frog and Tadpole Study Group (FATS), looks at the history of women working on frogs. People have worked on Australian frogs since the 1830s but the names of any women don’t appear until the 1970s, 140 years later!
The first woman noted was a Victorian lady Patsy Littlejohn, wife of Dr. Murray Littlejohn. He was a frog biologist and very interested in acoustics (the sounds frog make and how they use them). He started work on frog sounds in the 1950s. Patsy became his sound engineer going on all the field trips with her reel-to-reel tape recorders. They would later analyse the frog call structures. Murray was the first to prove that frogs made a species-specific call to attract females. Receptive female frogs were collected and played a series of calls to see how they reacted.
Patsy Littlejohn (ABC)
|
|
| |
| He also demonstrated pre-mating isolation, where frogs segregated parts of their population. Doing minor changes to their call caused rapid speciation.
Patsy didn’t get her name on a lot of the publications but everyone working on frogs at the time knew of the work she was doing. There was a tradition that only certain people could put their names on publications, along with a hierarchy of whose names could go where, so technicians like Patsy didn’t get a look in.
|
|
|
| |
|
The 1970s sees the first of the women scientists working in frog biology. Margaret Davies, an anatomist from the University of Adelaide, worked on frogs for nearly 30 years. She started off with a Masters at ANU working on frogs called Uperoleia, little tiny mud-coloured frogs, typically overlooked by everyone as they were small and hard to find.
|
|
| |
| Margaret Davies (Dept of Premier and Cabinet) When she started work on this group in 1969 there were only six species described but when she finished there were 42. She also discovered that some of them had quite unusual aspects to their biology and started a completely new area in science to do with their behaviour. These tiny frogs don’t have many defences yet are a highly successful group because of their behavioural strategies. Her real speciality was in frog anatomy and doing basic structural comparisons. She described over 30 species of frogs and her work was so highly prized she was awarded the Australian Order of Merit (AOM) for services to herpetology, the first woman scientist in the frog world to be formally recognised.
|
|
|
| |
|
In the year 2000 a young, female, post-graduate ecologist appeared. Skye Wassens (below left) had an interest in wetland dependent fauna, in particular the species that occurred in the inland regions of Australia that occupy ephemeral wetlands. Ephemeral wetlands may be dry for 20 years but then get flooded so the fauna goes through their entire life cycle in a 3-6 month period and are then quiescent for many years afterwards.
|
|
| |
| She ended up doing a lot of work in the Murray-Darling Basin, her main study area being the Lowbidgee floodplains. She ended up becoming a major government advisor particularly on the release of environmental flow water from inland dams and what that was likely to do to some of the downstream fauna. She was able to show that the timing of the environmental flows was critical, especially in triggering breeding events and flowering events. She has 58 frog publications to her credit.
|
|
|
| |
|
Marion Anstis was a music teacher and was President of the Australian Herpetological Society when Arthur first met her. Her interest was in tadpoles on which no one had done any serious work. She was starting to write up some interesting descriptions on tadpole behaviours and wrote a few papers, as she still taught full time.
|
|
| |
|
| When she retired she worked full bore on the study of Australian tadpoles. Within four years of her retirement she put out her first opus “The Tadpoles of South-east Australi” where she described in great detail the structure and behaviour of around 120 species of tadpoles. This was a cutting edge, seminal work and many frog biologists from other parts of the world came to see her method. Her work depended on collecting eggs, rearing the eggs and bringing the tadpoles through the various stages of their development. Four years ago she went one step further and published “Tadpoles and Frogs of Australia”, describing every frog species in the country, something that had never been done anywhere in the world on a national basis. She set the standards for the future descriptions of frogs and was awarded a PhD for the work in her book.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Lee Berger started as a student ecologist at James Cook University looking at the behaviour of tropical frogs in far north Queensland. There, some species occur at the top of mountains as well as the lush rainforest below, very different ecosystems. She was curious to see how those frog species adapted but in the second year the frog populations at some sites began to crash and by the third year of her PhD most of the sites had been totally devastated or the number of frogs had been greatly reduced. She changed her entire project to find out what had killed the frogs. She first isolated the cause as the chytrid fungus which was very common in soils but this version was new. It had come to Australia in 1974 as a result of people jet-setting around the world. As a result, microorganisms come into contact with each other and chytrid hybridised into a new pathogen. Dr Berger is now looking at the genesis of chytrid and its evolution.
|
|
|
| |
|
| | Michelle Stockwell worked at the University of Newcastle. She picked up on Lee’s work on chytrid and looked to see if chytrid could be controlled in field situations. By then sick frogs could be picked up and treated in laboratories but there was no way of dealing with sick frogs in vast wetlands. She looked at in situ protection of frogs and a month ago the university announced that they have a way of protecting green and gold bell frogs from chytrid in the field using salt regime treatments.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Jodi Rowley started in FATS as a young girl and has gone on to become the major frog biologist in the southern hemisphere. She has done extensive field survey work in New Guinea, parts of SE Asia and northern parts of Australia. A big discoverer of new frog species she also helps indigenous communities in SE Asia to look after wildlife, particularly frogs. Currently the University of Wollongong has three female PhD students all working on different aspects of the recovery of the Corroboree frog, one of the most threatened in Australia. Their research looks at frog recovery in the laboratory but a way to modify their habitats in such a way the frogs can be returned.
|
|
|
| |
|
Women have many contributions to frog research over the years. In the world of frogging they have been great girl guides.
Dr Arthur White was interviewed for A Question of Balance by Ruby Vincent. Images supplied by Dr White. Summary text by Victor Barry March 2018.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 For more information, please contact us |
)
