26th February
by Drs Katherine Orthmann and Ian Muchina
Our frogs that were collected last night were brought back to their home near lake Naivasha after a stay in our rooms. We then went on to collect some data from our specimens including weight, size, species, gender, and took some swabs from their underside to aid us in identifying the potential for disease.
We also checked our pitfall traps that we had set up overnight but unfortunately we collected no frogs! We guess this is the nature of field studies and adjustments that we might consider if doing this again would be to dig deeper holes and allow for more time for the specimens to familiarise themselves with a foreign structure around their habitat. The three frog species that we collected were the Nile Ridge Frog, Mozambique Ridge Frog, and Northern Clawed Frog. All of our collected frogs seemed happy to be released back into their habitat- hopefully they were safe from the birds that were watching us during this exercise! Lee surprised us with a small awards ceremony at the end where Roopan won the award for collecting the most frogs and Mercy for overcoming her fear of frogs.
Luckily we had a break for the rest of this afternoon to allow us to relax and catch up on studying for our upcoming exams.
