Mara Dudley

What species might actually be found in your listener's area is going to depend a lot on the habitats that are present.

And primarily, is your listener within about 100 yards of a body of water is going to make a big difference in terms of what species they might find.

I'll say this to your listener.

They probably don't want to see her as much as she does not want to see them, right?

Because

Any large organism is going to appear to be a predator to any kind of amphibian or reptile in the area.

If your listener loves to garden, then she is probably benefiting significantly from having...

snakes or frogs in her garden because they are some of the biggest consumers of insects and other pests like mice and rats and chipmunks that might be consuming things in her garden.

If you move into a given area and there's a low amount of development around you, and over time, the demand for housing increases, what that means is all of these pockets that are natural areas tend to be then taken up and developed.

And what that means is that what was potentially suitable habitat for a lot of amphibians and reptiles now

is no longer suitable, and those species have to move.

Particularly when it comes to amphibians, these species that live in terrestrial ecosystems most of the year and breed in freshwater ecosystems.

If there's now a road that is going through that connection in between, that puts a lot of species at greater risk for mortality.

It was estimated that up to 92 million frogs were killed per year by cats in Australia.

And there have been some similar studies and kind of numbers that are coming out for the United States as well.

It's in the millions.

And that's just frogs.

So the community science program is called the Metro Atlanta Amphibian Monitoring Program, which we like to refer to as MAMP because that's quite a mouthful.