8

How the Bog Frog Got Its Name

The Pine Barrens Treefrog (Hyla andersonii) was first recorded in Florida in 1970, having been previously known only from New Jersey, the Carolinas, and a single report from eastern Georgia (Christman 1970). Early surveys located only 11 breeding sites in Florida, and 4 of those had been destroyed by development when, in 1977, the Florida population of the Pine Barrens Treefrog was determined by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to be Endangered under provisions of the Endangered Species Act (USFWS 1977).

I began working as a herpetologist for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission in December 1977. One of the first projects I began was a survey for the recently federally listed Pine Barrens Treefrog. Between May and August that first year, as I figured out how and where to find them, I found 26 new localities for the frog. Working from soil and topographic maps to identify potential hillside and stream bottom seepage wetlands, I located 56 new localities in the second season, including the first 3 localities in Alabama. The following season added another 35 localities, bringing to 117 the total localities added since federal listing. By then, it had become apparent that the Pine Barrens Treefrog was much more common and widely distributed than had been thought at the time of listing. At the request of USFWS, I prepared a delisting package for the Florida population of the Pine Barrens Treefrog in 1980, and the frog was ultimately removed from the Endangered Species List in 1983 (USFWS 1983).

Florida designated the Pine Barrens Treefrog as a Species of Special Concern, and monitoring of these newly discovered populations continued. On 21 July 1982, I was monitoring calling activity at localities on Eglin Air Force Base (AFB). Protocol involved visiting sites after dark and listening for calling males. If none were heard, I would vocally imitate the call in hopes of soliciting a call response. At 9:18 p.m., I stopped at Milligan Creek and immediately heard several Pine Barrens Treefrogs calling south of the road. As I was writing in my notebook, I became aware of an unfamiliar call emanating from a small tributary stream next to the road. The call consisted of a series of 12 to 20 chuck notes repeated at about 5 notes per second. It didn’t sound like a bird, but it was unlike any of the frogs known from Florida.

I laid my notebook aside and went to investigate. I soon found a small ranid frog sitting in shallow water along the edge of a rivulet. It had dorsolateral folds and looked like a small, tan Bronze Frog (Rana clamitans). I placed the frog in a plastic bag and continued on with the night’s Pine Barrens Treefrog survey. I heard the same odd call at five more sites that evening, and investigation at each site revealed a small, tan frog that looked much like a Bronze Frog.

I got back to the motel around midnight and pulled out one of the evening’s peculiar frogs. The first thing I noticed through the plastic was that the webbing of the rear foot was very reduced. Three phalanges of the longest toe extended beyond the webbing, whereas in the Bronze Frog only two phalanges extend beyond the web. The third phalanx was as long as the first two combined, so the free section of the toe was double that of the Bronze Frog. The other four toes each had two phalanges beyond the web, whereas the web of the Bronze Frog extends to the tips of those toes. This was clearly not a Bronze Frog and not a species previously known from Florida.

However, I was troubled by one thought. Eglin AFB is a military installation, and from 1955 to 1975 the United States had been engaged in the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War). Had some airman returned from Southeast Asia with a few frogs as souvenirs? I sent some tissues to Tom Uzzell, who soon confirmed immunologically that this frog was a member of the Rana catesbeiana group of North American frogs. There was no longer any doubt that it was a new species.

Surveys for this novelty in 1983–1984 produced 10 additional localities, all in small seepage-fed streams draining to the lower Yellow River in Okaloosa and Santa Rosa Counties, Florida. Seven of the new localities were on Eglin AFB, and the other three were along three small adjacent streams on private timber lands immediately across the river from Eglin.

I now had a series of specimens and had identified the tadpole. It was time to prepare the description for publication. For the scientific name, I chose Rana okaloosae, after Okaloosa County, where I first found the frog. The name okaloosae is shared with a fish (Etheostoma okaloosae) and a crayfish (Procambarus okaloosae) also native to the region.

But what should the common name be? Early on, my colleagues and I had begun referring to the frog, somewhat tongue in cheek, as the bog frog. Dale Jackson, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, began tracking occurrences of the species and labeled it as the seepage stream frog. When I reached the point in the manuscript to suggest a common name, I wrote Dale’s rather cumbersome seepage stream frog as the common name.

This was in the days before personal computers and word processors. The usual procedure was to write out the text in long hand on a yellow legal pad and give it to a typist to prepare the typed manuscript. I completed the draft and gave it to our typist, Terri Crown, to type. Two hours later as I was sitting in my office, there came a tap-tap-tap at the door. The door opened, and Terri stuck in her head and said with great conviction, It’s a Bog Frog. And that is how the seepage stream frog became the Bog Frog.

Hydrologists might argue that the habitats occupied by Bog Frogs are actually fens rather than bogs because they are maintained by constant seepage of water from surrounding uplands. However, fen is a term unfamiliar to most nonhydrologists, who, if they know the term at all, associate it with Wordsworth’s poem London 1802, in which he suggested that England had become a fen of stagnant waters (an oxymoron by modern usage, since fens are, by definition, not stagnant).

I long assumed that Terri had insisted on the name Bog Frog because it rolled so pleasingly off the tongue. There was a second alternative that I had not considered. I recently had lunch with Terri. It had been almost 40 years since she had insisted on Bog Frog as the common name for the species. When I reminded her of the day, she smiled and clarified that she had anticipated needing to frequently type the name in various correspondence and reports. She noted that Bog Frog requires only 8 keystrokes, whereas 19 keystrokes would be required for seepage stream frog. Thus, it seems that the Bog Frog may actually derive its name from the resulting economy of clerical effort.