Quote Originally Posted by GradStudentLeper View Post
Oh that explains it. Amphibians dont handle agricultural runoff very well. Not much standing water and any that is there is full of pesticides and other agrochemicals that can do things like sex-reverse the frogs, screw up reproductive pathways etc. Frogs would be better off in an urban area than an agricultural region...

A friend and I caught three more Fasciata last night along I 75. Only one of them so much as musked when my friend grabbed him (and he got bit twice). The others are already holdable...

The one I got the other day (the rescue) will curl up on my lap for an hour while I watch Babylon 5...
Mine love to curl up on my lap while I watch tv, too, without being restrained. My hypo girl has sat through entire NASCAR races, including the cautions and double-file re-starts. Even Boas aren't that laid-back. Her babies are taking frozen-thawed pinkies and salmon strips right from my fingers. These are just the perfect pet snakes, and with the various color mutations popping up, I have a hunch that Nerodia are going to be the "Next Big Thing" in captive-bred snakes.

I'd suspected that agriculture was responsible for the scarcity of frogs around here. The only frogs I've even heard, which were Green Tree Frogs, were in town. Farmers drain off any places with standing water out in the country, and those agricultural pesticides have done the rest. I used to see toads all over the place when I was a kid living out here, but then, there was standing water in the "bottom lands" where they could breed, that has all since been drained, plus we've had several really bad drought years in a row. Our rainfall yearly totals have only just now, this year, gotten back on track, but that's only just for some areas. Parts of the state are still in drought conditions.