Safe Havens for Healing… Dr Anthony Waddle introduces his Hotspot Saunas

Saturday 14 September, 10am-12pm

Come along with SEE Change Gungahlin and FrogWatch ACT on a Wildbark wander and pond site sauna installation with Dr Anthony Waddle, conservation biologist and Schmidt Science Fellow at Macquarie Uni. 

FrogWatch Coordinator Anke Maria will be there in conversation with Dr. Waddle about the efforts researchers and volunteers are making in the ACT to ensure frog populations survive.

For millennia humans have welcomed the frog chorus that heralded spring rains. Ancients celebrated these lusty amphibians in art and religion as tiny arbiters of fertility and abundance and though frog myths shift and are reshaped through time, nowhere in the story will you find an ending like the one that currently presents itself.

Today ponds and riverbeds around the world have become silent and empty as global frog populations plummet, decimated by the catastrophic Chytrid fungus. To date global efforts of the scientific community to halt ongoing amphibian extinctions have had little success. Currently 8 Australian frog species are at extreme risk of extinction!

AND JUST IN TIME:  New hope for today's vanishing frogs...a global breakthrough by an Australian research team led by Dr Anthony Waddle.

They have developed an effective inexpensive strategy to combat Chytrid by providing the frogs with a heated environment (Hot Spot shelters) that stimulate resistance to the fungus and allows the frogs to recover. Anthony has agreed to speak to us about his groundbreaking work and promises to provide us with an opportunity to contribute to his research by installing and monitoring frog saunas in our backyards and green spaces.