By Ministry of the Environment :
The Mountain Chicken Project, implemented by the Montserrat Department of Environment and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, hosted a visit by the Governor of Montserrat to a site within the Centre Hills where the third group of mountain chickens has recently been released.
As part of his visit, the Governor was shown how project staff uses radio-tracking equipment to locate released frogs in the forest, so they can be monitored. Once a mountain chicken was located, Lloyd Martin from the Department of Environment and Project Field Assistant Calvin ‘Blacka’ Fenton demonstrated how to swab a frog for chytrid fungus and to assess the frog for visible clinical signs.
The mountain chicken is a critically endangered terrestrial frog with small populations found only on Dominica and Montserrat. Current threats include habitat loss, predation by invasive species, such as rats and feral pigs and the recent invasion of the chytrid fungus which threatens the species with extinction.
Since its discovery in 1997, the chytrid fungus has been implicated in over 100 suspected amphibian species extinctions across the globe. As part of a research strategy formalised by international project partners the Mountain Chicken Project has conducted 3 releases of captive bred mountain chickens, which have been bred under quarantine conditions. The aim of these releases is to test a number of hypotheses that may lead to a set of conditions that will result in maximum survival rates of the released frogs. So far, although the fungus has been documented in the release populations, the project is hopeful that a small number of the release frogs will survive.
Gerard A L Gray
DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENT
