Frogs

Being a frog freak, I want to thank Alan Linn for his thoroughly delightful article (June 2) on the coqui frogs of Puerto Rico. I felt as though I was right there with him as he was searching for the elusive crooners. It was very enjoyable reading. ANNE WILSON Lakewood

In 1989, soon after I was appointed U.S. special envoy and ambassador on Afghanistan, the late mujahedin commander Abdul Haq conveyed a warning to me. Attempts by foreigners to organize the unruly, unpredictable and divided Afghan people would always fail, he said. He compared such efforts to a bazaar merchant trying to balance the weight of frogs on opposite trays of a produce scale. The merchant can load frogs on one tray. But as he begins to load the second tray, some of the frogs on the first one will inevitably jump off. And as he reloads them, frogs on the second tray will leap to the ground.

My fellow local herpetologists and I have noted the decline of frogs, but we did not know that it was part of a larger syndrome. In Southern California, it is easy to blame everything on development and habitat destruction. This, apparently, is not the case worldwide. I do know that places I went for frogs when I was a student in the early '60s no longer support any semblance of the frog populations extant at that time. If Jennings and Mark Hayes and other herpetologists concerned with the decline in amphibians are correct in their theories about why these animals are disappearing, I think we have a lot to think about--but we better do it quickly before this decline spreads irretrievably to the rest of the biome, including us. JERROLD J. FELDNER Van Nuys

Casey Pachall highlighted a record-setting game with a 42-yard touchdown pass to Skye Dawson with 4 minutes 26 seconds left that lifted No. 16-ranked Texas Christian to a 31-24 victory against Louisiana Tech in the Poinsettia Bowl on Wednesday night at San Diego. It was the eighth straight victory for Mountain West Conference champion TCU (11-2), which moves to the Big 12 Conference next year. It was the third time this season TCU overcame a fourth-quarter deficit to win. Pachall was 15 of 29 for 206 yards passing.

In a case that at first glance could pass for a science fiction movie plot, radioactive frogs are loose at a government lab. About 100 so-called "hot frogs" have been caught hopping away from a contaminated pond where they hatched this spring, officials at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory said. "They don't have six legs and four eyes," said Frank Kornegay, the lab's environmental coordinator. He said they look like ordinary leopard frogs that are common in Tennessee.

Regarding "Frogs Trump Fish" [Aug. 16], on the removal of trout to protect mountain yellow-legged frogs, while I support the preservation of our natural resources, I am also an advocate of common sense. Have we overlooked that the frogs are part of Mother Nature's food chain? What would be the impact on the world if this frog ceased to exist? Monumental? I don't think so. GARY LEARN La Mesa

The rare mountain yellow-legged frog recovers nicely in lakes once trout are expelled, according to a new study. The frogs swarmed the Sierra a century ago, but their numbers have plummeted since the 1980s and they are endangered in Southern California. UC Berkeley biologist Vance T. Vredenburg monitored 21 mountain lakes for eight years.

Talk about concealed weapons: Harvard University biologists have discovered that some species of African frogs can puncture the skin of their toes with sharp, hooked bones and use them as claws to fight off predators. The previously unknown defense mechanism came to light when doctoral student David C. Blackburn picked up one of the fist-sized amphibians in Cameroon and got a bloody scratch when the frog violently kicked its hind legs. He and colleagues reported in the journal Biology Letters that they later identified 11 species with the ability to flex a muscle that projects the sharp bone through the skin when threatened.

Real estate agents in Hawaii are including the presence of certain frogs in their property disclosures, the way that they already disclose termites and other potential hazards. The coqui frog, a native of Puerto Rico, has multiplied in such proportions throughout Hawaii that its distinctive, high-pitched chirp has turned into a nuisance. Agents report that buyers disturbed by the noise level are backing out of deals.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday designated 1.6 million acres in California as critical habitat for the endangered red-legged frog, made famous by Mark Twain in his story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The amphibian, once so plentiful that it was commonly featured on restaurant menus, eventually became endangered because of development encroaching on its habitat and the effects of pesticides and other chemicals. The habitat area is divided into 50 units across 27 California counties, including six counties that previously did not have designated critical habitat: Mendocino, Sonoma, Placer, Calaveras, Stanislaus and Kings.

Turns out writing a Muppet script is no easy task. Star Jason Segel and his "The Muppets" screenwriting partner Nicholas Stoller, who previously collaborated on "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Get Him to the Greek," spent four years writing a script that both honored the Jim Henson Muppet movies of the past and remained relevant today, they told an audience at the Envelope Screening Series. That required learning the specific rules of each Muppet and simplifying a very complicated initial premise. Learn more about a rather complex writing process -- one that may have involved adult-size Muppet costumes -- ¿in the video clip below.

When: 7:30. Where: Galen Center On the air: Radio: 690. Records: USC 4-7, TCU 7-3. Update: USC played TCU for the first time last season in Fort Worth and lost, 81-69. The Horned Frogs return three starters and eight lettermen from that team, which finished 11-22. Five TCU players are averaging 9.0 points or more, led by senior guard Hank Thorns, who averages 13.5 points per game. TCU has won four straight games. This is USC's next-to-last nonconference game this season.

In the world of amphibian celebrities, there's no bigger star than Kermit the Frog. Yet back in January on the set of Disney's upcoming film "The Muppets" — the first big screen outing for Jim Henson's beloved menagerie since 1999's "Muppets in Space" — the bona fide A-lister was all hard work and self-deprecating charm. Just minutes before heading inside a Universal soundstage to film a scene in which he commends his performers on a hard day's work, he took a minute to explain to a reporter that he's found some renewed sense of inner peace, particularly when it comes to being green.

A high-ranking member of the Zetas crime group suspected of widespread drug trafficking has been arrested, Mexican officials said Thursday. Carlos Oliva Castillo, known as "Frog," was captured Wednesday in the northern city of Saltillo, where he allegedly ran drug-trafficking operations spanning several states, said Col. Ricardo Trevilla, spokesman for the armed forces. Gunmen sought to rescue Oliva by trying to distract soldiers with gunfire around the city, authorities said.

After more than a year of watching their league be picked apart, leaders of Big 12 Conference schools finally made a proactive move Thursday by voting to add Texas Christian as early as next year. It was the first aggressive act by a league desperate to secure its membership amid dramatic shifts in conference affiliation. And if the Horned Frogs join the Big 12, it would be another sharp blow to the Big East, which was expecting to welcome TCU next year. TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. suggested TCU is all but ready to join the Big 12. "These discussions with the Big 12 have huge implications for TCU," Boschini said.

They're Hermit Crabs as much as Horned Frogs, picking up and leaving every 10 minutes or so. The school could merge with a packing company and become TCU-Haul. Next year's move to the Big East will mark Texas Christian's fifth conference affiliation since 1995, the school's last year in the now-defunct Southwest Conference. The Horned Frogs then joined the Western Athletic, moved to Conference USA in 2001 and to the Mountain West in 2005. One thing with the football program hasn't changed much, though: This is Gary Patterson's 14th season at TCU, his 11th as head coach.

Some like it hot. Apparently, the endangered mountain yellow-legged frog is not among them. The 3-inch-long amphibians much prefer it cold as melting snow. So conservationists at the San Diego Zoo have placed two dozen of the nearly extinct frogs in refrigerators they joshingly refer to as "Valentine's Day retreats" in hopes the amphibians will emerge with the urge. To mate, that is. The big chill at the zoo's Institute for Conservation Research represents one of the nation's most ambitious wildlife reintroduction experiments.

A frog has been found in a remote part of Indonesia that has no lungs and breathes through its skin, a discovery that researchers this week said could provide insight into what drives evolution in certain species. The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis was found on Borneo island in 2007, researchers said Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a wormlike creature known as a caecilian.

One of the nation's most ambitious wildlife reintroduction efforts has suffered a setback with the deaths of 104 mountain yellow-legged frogs that had been rescued from the fire-stripped San Gabriel Mountains in 2009, authorities said Tuesday. The federally endangered frogs, which recently metamorphosed from the tadpole stage, died in captive breeding tanks over the last several weeks at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. "We have two frogs left. We're trying to determine exactly what happened," said Scott Barton, director of the zoo, which is highly regarded for amphibian husbandry.

The Boy Who Liked to Eat Braden, 11 St. Margaret's Episcopal School San Juan Capistrano There once was a boy who liked to eat, upside-down with a plate on his feet. His favorite breakfast was Cheez-Its on snails, after which he would lick his fingers from his nubs to his nails. Lunch was sandwiches filled with salamander meat which he would nibble from his bedroom suite. And dinner was flapping, flopping, fighting, fliggity, floo-frogs who used to live in stinky bogs.