Program
A Brief History of the Bullfrog Control Program
In 1989 I received calls to the Royal British Columbia Museum from Victoria residents who were amazed to see very large tadpoles crowding the margins of Beaver Lake, just north of the City. I investigated and easily identified them as American bullfrogs. At that time I was unsure what could be done to curtail an invasion by this highly prolific species. By the mid-1990’s I thought that I had a plan and ran some simple tests on trapping and manual capture techniques. Alas, my applications for funding were not successful.
In 1998 I was offered the job of setting up a national amphibian conservation program in Australia. In fact, it was the largest privately funded conservation program of its type in the world. This experience brought me into direct contact with the problems created by invasive populations of the cane toad (Bufo marinus). Here was a set of problems that were infinitely more hazardous and difficult to solve than the eradication of a few populations of American bullfrogs back in British Columbia.
When I returned to Canada in the summer of 2003, I was determined to get a program underway on southern Vancouver Island that would work towards the total eradication of bullfrog populations. If novel and effictive techniques could be developed here they would have application all over the world, since bullfrogs are cropping up just about everywhere to threaten native ecosystems.
