Tree frog may leap into officialdom
Sunday, March 02, 2003
Web posted at 12:00:01 AM EST
Bo
Emerson
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
(ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA) The green
tree frog is an unassuming creature.
It spends most of its day perched
on pondside vegetation, legs folded under its lime-colored body,
trying not to look like a frog. If it succeeds and outwits its
many predators (including herons and raccoons), it spends most
of the night singing and trying to mate.
State Rep. Barbara Massey Reece
(D-Menlo) wants to make the green tree frog a star, the official
amphibian of the state of Georgia.
"I do think it's appropriate
to have a state amphibian, since we rank second in the nation
in the number of species of amphibians," says Reece.
Frog lovers may be shocked, but
although Georgia can boast of an official state insect (the
honeybee), a state bird (the brown thrasher), a state vegetable
(the Vidalia onion), a state fossil (shark tooth) and a state
seashell (the knobbed whelk), we have yet to elect a state amphibian.
"It's a slighted group,"
says John Jensen, a state herpetologist who helped Reece prepare
her bill.
All the other vertebrates have
a representative in the state's lexicon of symbols, including
fish (largemouth bass), reptiles (gopher tortoise) and mammals
(right whale), and some are even overrepresented. (We have two
insects, two birds and two different kinds of flowering plants.)
Reece was prompted to introduce
the bill in January by a group of students from Armuchee Elementary
School in Rome, who discovered the lack of state representation
for Georgia's metamorphic constituency.
Combining biology and civics, the
children are also studying how a bill becomes a law. A busload
of fourth-graders plans to motor down to the Capitol when Reece
introduces the bill to the House floor in the next few weeks.
"They already have their bus driver set up and their permission
slips signed," Reece said.
So why the green tree frog? Well,
they eat plenty of insects, they are eaten by many birds and
mammals, and they sing like ducks.
"It's very duck-like,"
says Jensen of the frog's song. "It's 'wack-wack-wack-wack,'
real nasal, quite loud, and they almost always occur in big
groups, what they call choruses."
Georgians who live near ponds,
which can host hundreds of singing frogs, might find it hard
to sleep some spring nights because of froggy serenades.
Jensen says the green tree frog
had a bid for state froghood once in 1998, but, in a bad bit
of parliamentary luck, the bill croaked. "We never got
out of committee."
What of the other slighted Amphibia,
the axolotls and newts and salamanders? "I haven't heard
from any salamander fans," says Reece.
GRAPHIC: Photo: A group of Floyd
County fourth-graders is hoping the green tree frog will be
named the official state amphibian. Their Georgia representative
has crafted a bill to make it happen./ JOHN J. LOPINOT / Palm
Beach [Fla.] Post
Copyright Notice:
Copyright 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Reprinted
from http://www.frogs.org/news/article.asp?CategoryID=1&InfoResourceID=1787
