Other bits and bobs

In my previous blogs I have covered most of the main things that the project is doing for the mountain chicken but for sake of length I omitted some things out. So now I can tell you about some of the other bits and bobs relating to mountain chickens.

On Montserrat the first event that diminished the mountain chicken population was the volcano on the island. This erupted in 1996 and has erupted periodically since then. This initially destroyed large amounts of habitat and although there has been a lot of ash fall since, it does not appear to have had any serious impact on the remaining mountain chickens but certainly wouldn't have helped. However, there is not a lot you can do about a volcano and fortunately activity has died down quite a bit.

Aerial view of Montserrat with the volcano

As well as chytrid, invasive species have had an impact on mountain chickens. Invasive species are those that are not native to an island but have been introduced by humans. On Montserrat there are rats, which have been seen to bite and injure mountain chickens and potentially predate small frogs; feral pigs and goats damage the habitat and cane toads which compete with mountain chickens for food and are also a reservoir for chytrid. One of the studies that is going to be done on Montserrat is to investigate the impacts of rats on mountain chickens: e.g. do the frogs do worse in areas with lots of rats? The findings will be used to inform future management and actions.

Frog logger attached to tree for recording calling mountain chickens (Photo: S-L Adams)

Another survey technique we have been using are remote surveying devices called ‘frog loggers’. These are recording devices that record any mountain chickens calling using microphones and recording onto memory cards. These are helpful as can give information on activity and distribution without having to spend lots of time walking around. The only thing is that they can only tell you about male mountain chickens as it is only the males that call. Below is a video of a male mountain chicken calling to a female:

Planning how to save the mountain chicken

The project to save the mountain chicken, like many conservation projects, is not going to succeed overnight. It will take many years of hard work and cooperation by a range of people and organisations. How do you plan for something like this? The answer is you come up with an Action Plan!

An Action Plan is a plan that outlines the main objectives and targets for conserving the species and which organisations or groups will take overall responsibility for making sure they get done. To come up with one involves getting all the main partners and people together, usually over 3 or so days to discuss the progress so far and what needs to be done in the future. These workshops certainly aren't as fun as being in the forest but are very important!

Action Planning workshop for the mountain chicken, Montserrat 2013 (Photo: S-L Adams)

This is what took place in Montserrat last August to come up with a new combined Action Plan for the mountain chicken in both Montserrat and Dominica. It involved people from many organisations in Montserrat, Dominica and the UK and resulted in a 20 year action plan being agreed.

Mountain chicken taking an anti-fungal solution bath: trialling ways to treat chytrid (Photo: G. Garcia/Durrell)

Some of the main objectives in this that we will be working towards over the forthcoming years are:

1.         Making the mountain chicken a leading or flagship species for global amphibian conservation

2.         Discover or develop methods to treat chytrid in the wild

3.         Reintroduce and establish new populations of mountain chickens on Montserrat and Dominica

Montserrat Forestry staff being trained in how to swab and survey mountain chickens (Photo: S-L Adams)

There is a long way to go but there is a great group of people working on this and the project will train new local people in the various methods and skills needed to protect it. That way in the future the mountain chicken can be ensured by people living on the islands with minimal assistance from overseas making it far more sustainable, which would be a fantastic achievement. 

Getting the message out about mountain chickens

Ensuring the survival of a threatened species does not only involve research in the field and in labs although this is crucial! The long-term survival of a species, no matter what it is or where it is in the world, needs local people and communities to have the knowledge, understanding, skills and desire to conserve it.  After all why would someone act in a different way or give money or time to save something if they knew nothing about it? Therefore a really important component of any conservation programme involves education, raising awareness amongst people about the plight of the species or habitat. 

School children in Montserrat learning about threats to mountain chickens (Photo: S-L Adams)

These sorts of components have been a key part of our mountain chicken work from the beginning. They have involved a lot of different activities and covered many different aspects relating to mountain chickens including chytrid and the impact of invasive species. As well as producing posters, leaflets websites the team has done a lot of work with local schools and kids like you. This includes going into the classes and talking about the mountain chicken and taking them into the forest to see what they get up to.

School children learning how to swab a cane toad for chytrid (Photo: S-L Adams)

In Montserrat the radio is much more popular than television so the project has done lots of radio interviews to explain to the community what the project is doing and has achieved.

The mountain chicken team speaking on local ZJB radio (Photo: S-L Adams)

One of the main aims of the awareness programme was to generate pride in the mountain chicken as the national animal of Montserrat and this has been seen to be happening in many creative ways. People love to party in the Caribbean which always usual involve various types of music competitions and the mountain chicken was the subject of an entry into one of Montserrat’s Junior Calypso contests written by one of the islands leading musicians! Similar novel awareness work has been done in Dominica with the most recent Carnival (the big, big event of the year!) featuring the winner of Miss Dominica in a full Mountain Chicken costume!

"Sugar T" singing about the mountain chicken in the 2012 St. Patrick's Junior Calypso Competition (Photo: S-L Adams)

 All of this education and awareness work is an integral part of the project and is something the team will continue to do especially in schools and with young people.

Tree frogging adventures

The mountain chicken isn’t the only species of amphibian found on Montserrat. The two others are the tiny tree frog Johnston’s whistling frog (Eleutherodactylus johnstonei) and the introduced cane toad (Rhinella marinus). Neither of these species are affected by chytrid but both carry it and act as disease reservoirs which infect the mountain chickens.

Video of a Johnston's whistling frog calling - a very common sound every night in Montserrat! 

Indeed it is this little tree frog that is thought to have been how chytrid got to Montserrat in the first place. Montserrat imports almost all of its fresh fruit and vegetables from neighbouring Caribbean islands with Dominica being a major exporter. Tree frog’s carrying the disease most likely came over in shipments of bananas and other goods, escaped into the wild and spread the disease leading to the population crash in mountain chickens.

One of the important bits of information the team has been collecting in Montserrat over the last three years is on chytrid itself. How widespread is it? Is it more abundant at certain times of the year than others? All very important questions in our understanding of the disease dynamics. How to do this? Catch and swab lots and lots of tree frogs!

Tree-frogging (as we call it) takes place once a month at all four of the main field sites. Along a 500m transect the team walk and aim to catch at least 60 tree frogs at night which takes about 4 hours. Not so easy when they are small, hide in the leaf litter and are very quick! When they are caught each frog is swabbed using something that looks like large cotton bud. This is done twice for each frog to ensure that any errors or unusual results in analysis can be tested. These swabs are stored in cool conditions before eventually being sent back to the UK for testing in laboratories at London Zoo.

Swabbing a tree frog for chytrid (Photo: S-L Adams)

When handling frogs all surveyors wear gloves and change them in between frogs to prevent cross contamination. To ensure that the surveyors don’t collect the same frog again once processed the frogs are put inside the glove and the gloves stapled to the trees - which look very strange! Don’t worry the frogs are perfectly fine in there (amphibians need a lot less oxygen than mammals) and once the survey is finished they are all released back into the night.

Tree frogging and the strange gloved trees that appear! (Photo: S-L Adams)

Some initial findings from this research are that chytrid loads in tree frogs (that is how much of it they have on them) correlates to rainfall. Specifically loads are higher if the drier the preceding month, which is vital information for helping plan any future releases or treatments.

How to find frogs in the forest

Although maintaining mountain chickens in captivity is currently very important it is even more important to see how they are coping in the wild. As I mentioned previously numbers of mountain chickens have dropped massively over the last few years and Durrell has been carrying out surveys in Montserrat for them.

To look for them we survey along streams known locally as ghauts (pronounced “guts”). This is done at night when mountain chickens are most active. When surveying for them you have to walk carefully and slowly to try and avoid disturbing them and look out for them in the torch light. Like many nocturnal animals their eyes shine when a caught in the torch light. Unfortunately in Montserrat mountain chickens are now only found in one ghaut, called Fairy Walk and there are only about 5 individuals left!

Setting up a survey in one of the ghauts (Photo: G. Garcia/Durrell)

In addition to looking for wild mountain chickens we have been releasing some of the captive individuals back into Montserrat. Even though chytrid is still present these releases allow us to trial treatment techniques and investigate how mountain chickens and the disease interact, where the frogs go, how they live etc. This is one of the very first projects anywhere in the world to study amphibians in the wild with chytrid and the information we get will be vital in trying to find a cure.

So how do you track a frog? By radio! Before the frogs are released into the wild each one has a small radio transmitter implanted under the skin by a trained vet. These radio transmitters send out a signal that can be picked up by an antenna and will lead you straight to the frog. Sounds easy and it would be if it was flat and open countryside. But Montserrat is very hilly with steep, rocky ridges and valleys and lots of trees. This makes finding a signal and therefore the frogs very difficult.

Radio tracking mountain chickens (Photo: S-L Adams)

The team go out four or five nights a week to radio track the frogs spending about six hours a night walking around the forests - sometimes with no success! However that makes finding one even more satisfying. When a frog is found a device reads the unique PIT tag number to identify that individual frog. It is weighed and measured, checked for signs of disease, take swabs to test for chytrid and mark its position using a GPS. All this information gives us useful data on how the frogs are surviving and where they are going, which helps us plan the best ways to conserve them.

Measuring a found mountain chicken (Photo: S-L Adams)

Whilst it is tiring walking up and down the steep slopes in the middle of the night, it is also great fun at times especially when you find a frog. Still the day off at the end of week is most welcome for the team!

Chickens in captivity

Hi again. Hopefully now you know more about the amazing mountain chicken and the reasons why it is so threatened. Now to tell you some of the main things we have been doing to help save it from extinction. As you read last time there is no cure yet known for chytrid so one of the first things we had to do was rescue mountain chickens from the wild on Montserrat. In 2009, when chytrid was discovered on Montserrat an emergency rescue mission was undertaken which took 50 frogs to Jersey and was so important it made the news across the UK: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/21/wildlife-conservation

Mountain chickens being rescued from Montserrat (Photo: G. Garcia/Durrell)

The frogs were flown over to the UK and then Jersey packed in boxes. In Jersey Durrell started to breed them and sent some of the frogs to other zoos in London, Chester and Sweden. When keeping the frogs in captivity they have to be kept in ‘bio-secure’ conditions. This effectively means they are in quarantine and is designed to prevent any diseases getting into the frogs. When keepers go into these areas they have to change footwear, wear suits, masks and gloves to ensure they don’t bring anything in!

Looking after these frogs in captivity is not straightforward as they are very big and eat a lot so cost a lot of money. But keeping a captive breeding population is very important to ensure their survival, especially when they disease is still present in the wild. Also, Keeping them in captivity also allows us to find out things about them that would be very difficult to do in the wild such as how they breed. Knowing as much about the species as possible is very important for making decisions on how to protect them in the wild.

Follow this link to see a video and article on the alien like tadpole behaviour of the mountain chicken, first recorded at Jersey: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8185125.stm

As well as having breeding populations overseas there is also a captive breeding centre on Dominica itself. This was set up in 2010 and is the first amphibian breeding centre in the country. This is very important as it will allow people living in Dominica to learn how to look after and breed mountain chickens in captivity with the ultimate aim to release them back into the wild.   

Mountain chickens in the Dominican captive breeding facility (Photo: S-L. Adams)

Next blog I'll tell you about some of the research

What has caused the mountain chickens to almost disappear?

In my last blog I told you that the mountain chicken is listed as Critically Endangered, which means it is facing the threat of going extinct very soon unless something is done. But why is this amazing frog so close to going the way of the dodo?

To understand the whole story we must first go back in time. Hundreds of years ago before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and Europeans began to arrive, the mountain chicken was found on 7 different islands in the Caribbean instead of the 2 it is today. As Europeans arrived and settled on the various islands of the Caribbean they brought with them, either deliberately or unintentionally, species that did not exist there before. These included rats, cats and small Indian mongoose.

Red islands where the mountain chicken is still found. Blue Islands where it is now extinct

Mongooses will eat pretty much anything, including frogs and is a successful predator. The native animals would never have seen a mongoose (or a cat or rat) so would not know how to react. On all the islands where mongooses were introduced the mountain chicken went extinct suggesting it was a main reason. Only Montserrat and Dominica have never had mongoose and it is no coincidence that they are the only two islands on which the mountain chicken still survives.

Small Indian mongoose - probably the main reason why the mountain chicken went extinct on the five other islands

So why if there are no mongooses on these two islands have the numbers of mountain chickens dropped by over 90% in the last 15 years? Local people did hunt the mountain chicken for food but not in the numbers to cause such a huge drop so quickly. Was it loss of habitat? Not really as they were quite happy in gardens on these islands although a volcano on Montserrat erupting did not help! No the answer is disease. In this case a particularly nasty, amphibian killing disease called chytridiomycosis or chytrid (pronounced ki-trid) for short.

Healthy mountain chicken (Photo: S-L Adams)

Chytrid isn’t caused by a virus or bacteria but by a fungus that infects the skin of amphibians. Unlike reptiles, amphibians have permeable skin, which they use to help absorb gases and water many species use their skin to help them breathe. When the fungus infects the skin it can inhibit these processes causing many problems for the animal and eventually death. Some of the visual signs of chytrid in mountain chickens are animals looking lethargic (tired), reddening of the belly and legs and skin peeling off.

Mountain chicken infected with chytrid (Photo: S-L Adams)

One strange thing is that chytrid is not deadly to all amphibians. Some species can carry the fungus but appear to be completely uninfected by it. For other species however, like the mountain chicken, it is deadly and it has been the main reason for a number of amphibian species going extinct in Latin America and Australia. Why there is this difference between species is one of the many questions scientists are trying to answer.    

The other big question scientists are trying to answer is how to cure chytrid and to stop it from spreading. At the moment there is no known cure or treatment and is one of the things this project is trying to help with. Find out more in my next blog!