Oh the irony..mountain chickens and volcanos

Last week saw us organise the second workshop for the Mountain chicken restoration programme. Those of you following the blog will know about the plight of the mountain chicken frog. Reduced to existing on the two Caribbean islands of Montserrat and Dominica by the introduction of predators such as mongoose and rats, the species has now been hit by chytrid on both islands. Coupled with this, the last remaining wild population of any size then got covered in volcanic ash by a partial dome collapse in the Soufriere volcano in Montserrat in February (sound familiar??)

So for some time a group of European organisations (Durrell, Chester Zoo and Parken Zoo) and the governments of Montserrat and Dominica have formed a collaboration to see if we can save this species. Through a combined approach of research into the management of chytrid in the field and captive breeding to prepare frogs for reintroduction we hope to be able to both advance existing knowledge into the disease that is affecting so many amphibians and to see a self-sustaining population of mountain chickens be returned to Montserrat and Dominica.

So it is with not a little irony that having brought our partners over to Jersey to discuss how we will work in the shadow of the very active Soufriere volcano on Montserrat, some of them got stuck on the island as the airways over Europe got closed down thanks to the ash clouds coming out of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

The eruption in Montserrat came at a bad time at the end of a series of field trails which aimed to assess whether, through anti-fungal treatments, the survival of the frogs could be extended. The ash came down during the final observation period when we were hoping to monitor longer term survival. Given that our field sites are within the exclusion zone around the volcano, these areas became off limits very quickly. A few days after the eruption our volunteer in Montserrat, Sarah Louise Smith, was able to take Montserrat Volcano Observatory staff into the field site, and they were met with a ‘winter wonderland’ of thick grey ash covering everything. This need not be as catastrophic as it sounds. Ash can quickly wash away and we know that the frogs have had to cope with the fallout from ash for a long time before. However we don’t have any data on what effects the eruptions have on survival and certainly for a population so threatened by the effects of chytrid, environmental events such as this may be all it takes to send the wild population over the edge.

It is extreme environmental events such as this that can be the final straw for species when their populations dwindle to such few numbers. When a species becomes this rare, for example as the Madagascar pochard has, captive breeding approaches often provide the only genuine conservation option both as a real safety net for the species (the frogs the European institutions hold may be the last survivors of the Montserrat mountain chicken) and a source for any subsequent reintroduction effort.

As for the next steps for the mountain chicken, we were very fortunate to be granted Darwin Initiative funding to start a reintroduction effort for the species. At the meeting we put together a plan to carry out a recce of potential reintroduction sites in the south of the island in May (we’ll keep you posted) and we took a number of steps to expand the breeding programme for the species, so that we can reintroduce the maximum numbers of frogs into the wild.