Symposium spotlights Far North treasures
FROGS aren’t generally regarded as “sexy” either in conservation or in human (kissing) terms, but a frog local to the wet tropics is ready to blow that myth out of the waterfall.
Associate Professor Conrad Hoskin, (JCU Townsville) gets excited when he talks about it.
“There’s a really cool frog called the Armoured Mist Frog,” he said.
“The males have these nuptial pads for gripping females, useful in a waterfall amplexus.”
He describes the amplexus as “the breeding embrace”, and because these frogs get together in waterfalls a “nuptial pad” is a crucial accessory to “amplexus”.
And for the record, a “nuptial pad” is not a room and a bed with red satin sheets and mirrors on the walls, but a set of spikes on the male’s chest.
Professor Hoskin’s work is in biodiversity, species discoveries, adaptation, threatened species, and species conservation.
He has a particular interest in frogs, and has even discovered one new to science himself. He is also one of the brains behind the second North Queensland Threatened Species Symposium, being held in Cairns from March 9-10.
The reason for the Symposium is to rustle action groups and recovery teams into one place, to get their heads together and determine what kinds of actions work best to conserve threatened species, of which there are plenty in the Wet Tropics.
Jacqui Diggins is also on the co-ordinating committee for the Symposium, and she describes action groups as local community groups that meet and do good works around locally threatened species.
One example is Kuranda Envirocare which has a subgroup working to ensure the Kuranda Treefrog has a future.
Volunteers get out in their spare time to restore and maintain habitats to improve breeding sites for frogs, monitor populations, eradicate pests, educate the community about the frog and conservation issues more generally, and run workshops and working groups.
The organisations behind the Threatened Species Symposium all have a stake of some kind in the Wet Tropics, whether it be government department, local council or natural resource management organisation.
“The big issues here, from a species conservation perspective, are the same as always, habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation,” Ms Diggins said.
“And for addressing these, what we’re trying to achieve is a co-ordinated approach across the board.
“We want the groups to walk away inspired and reinvigorated, and provide them with a platform for sharing their successes – and their less successful attempts.”
Some of the guest speakers will be from government, she said, as well as the odd scientist, but the majority will be from people in North Queensland who have experiences to share from their own groups and conservation efforts.
More information on the North Queensland Threatened Species Symposium: https://terrain.org.au/ nqtss-2023/