Innovations in Bullfrog Control and Eradication

BullfrogControl.com Inc. was established in 2005.  We work independently of institutional or university affiliations.  Our mandate is to design and implement a program of research and development in bullfrog management.  This has led to new and more effective strategies, techniques and methodologies for locating and capturing American bullfrogs, including maneuvering through their habitats and systematically eliminating populations.  The past three years of data now demonstrate conclusively that populations of this prolific species can be driven to local extinction in two to four years.  This means that regional eradications are now incontestably feasible and demonstrably practical.   

Stan A. Orchard is President of BullfrogControl.com Inc.  He is a conservation biologist/amphibian and reptile specialist. From 1981-1999 he ran a herpetology program in the Natural History Section of the Royal British Columbia Museum. From 1994-1999 he was the National Co-ordinator for Canada for the IUCN/SSC Task Force on Declining Amphibian Populations in Canada (DAPCAN). In 1994 he co-founded the Canadian Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Network (CARCNet) and served as its Chairman from 1994 to 1999. He is a member of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. In 1998 he was invited to Australia by WWF to – over four years – design, co-ordinate and manage the world’s largest privately-funded amphibian conservation program. It is now an independent organization known as ‘Frogs Australia’. In 2003, he resurrected plans to develop the strategies and tools to effectively control and eradicate populations of alien invasive amphibians. Currently, as President of BullfrogControl.com Inc., he works on southern Vancouver Island creating innovative, cost-effective, eco-friendly strategies, tactics and techniques for eradicating populations of the American bullfrog Rana (Lithobates) catesbeiana – listed as one of the 100 Worst Alien Invasive Species in the World.

The American Bullfrog Rana (Lithobates) catesbeiana is a robust, brilliant green amphibian that occurs in nature only in North America, from southern Québec and Ontario, throughout the Mississippi drainage, south to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. Its natural range does not extend across the prairies and Great Plains or west of the Rocky Mountains.  

Thriving populations of bullfrogs are today found all over the world because people have imported and released them in the hope of starting commercial farms to supply frogs and tadpoles for fish bait, pets, educational dissection, and human consumption. For the most part, frog farming has proven to not be a viable enterprise. In any case, it inevitably results in unwanted, noisy, and ecologically damaging American bullfrog populations.