"Every month now for the past three years," Marjorie says, "I have waded around the perimeter of Slow Water Park at noon, and counted the Rana viridiana frogs I see. The chart summarizes what I've seen.

"If you look at the yellow and green bars, you can see how their life is pretty much supposed to be: a certain number of frogs survive the winter, lay eggs in early spring. Tadpoles hatch and start turning into young frogs in May. There are plenty of insects to feed on, so the frog population explodes. Then the juveniles grow up into adult frogs, and as food begins to get scarce the population drops.

"The thick dark red bars show the number of frogs, both adult and juvenile, that I've seen this year. Compare them with the green bars - which show how the frogs were doing last year - and with the yellow bars - which show how they were doing the year before that - and you'll see that something's going wrong this year."

Back

JANUARY
"It seems like every winter, I see approximately the same number of frogs. Food is scarce then."

MARCH
"I sometimes see a small jump in the number of frogs in March. I think maybe a few come out of hibernation, or come back to the Park from outlying areas."

MAY
"See the little boxes outline in black? Those show how many of the frogs I saw were juvenile (young) ones. Juvenile frogs usually start appearing in May."

JULY
"By July, there are PLENTY of insects, and the tadpoles are really growing up fast. I see way more juvenile frogs than adults in July and August."

SEPTEMBER
"You can see that usually juveniles are growing up into adults at this time. But look at my most recent count for this year, in September. Only about half of this year's juvenile frogs became adults, I would guess."

OCT-NOV-DEC
(There are no red bars for these months because they haven't happened yet. The story is set in early October.)