A MUM with a difference is entering the New Year at Chester Zoo by achieving a world-first with her patenting skills.
One of the zoo’s Mountain Chickens - which is actually a huge frog - has taken on a new role as an adopted mum to a nest of abandoned tadpoles that ‘arrived’ at her door.
The new mum’s role came when Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (formerly Jersey Zoo) found that they had a foam nest of Mountain Chicken tadpoles which had been abandoned by their uncharacteristically non-maternal mother.
Despite the best efforts of the Herpetological staff at Durrell, the female would not feed the tadpoles and they became starved and weak.
Fortunately for them, Chester Zoo had a week-old foam nest that was infertile and had failed to hatch.
And so a plan was hatched to see if it would be possible to foster the unfortunate tadpoles. A long journey by boat and road was immediately arranged for the tadpoles.
Using a little cunning, staff at Chester Zoo were able to use their nest for the Jersey tadpoles and fooled their own Mountain Chicken frog into playing mum.
Richard Gibson, Chester Zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates said: “Our attentive mother was still looking after her infertile nest so with some guile and cunning I broke the nest open, snuck inside the contents of the Durrell nest - foam, slime, dirt and tadpoles - and retreated with fingers crossed.
“Amazingly, our Mountain Chicken was none the wiser and over the coming weeks we watched in awe as she nurtured the tiny tadpoles that weren’t her own – feeding them with thousands of tiny eggs from her own body, sitting guard in the nest tirelessly week after week, and eventually rearing them successfully into miniature versions of herself. Now that’s adoption on a level even Angelina Jollie and Madonna couldn’t match.”
Two larvae flourished and have now metamorphosed and left the nest.
It is the first time that a Mountain Chicken has been ‘duped’ into looking after a clutch of unrelated tadpoles and could pave the way to help the species which is critically endangered in the wild.”
“This is a great achievement as we had little hope that it would work. The maternal care shown by Mountain Chickens is very rare among amphibians and there must be some form of close communication between tadpoles and their mum that draws her to regularly feed them. However, we still don’t know how it’s mediated, whether it’s chemical, mechanical or even acoustic,” added Dr Gerardo García, head of herpetology for Durrell.
The long-term survival of this species will increasingly depend on breeding strategies of this kind in zoos. Cross-fostering could help increase productivity for these frogs and ultimately help ensure their survival in the long term. This level of maternal care is rare among amphibians and the fostering is something that has never been achieved before.
Mountain Chickens are native to the islands of Montserrat and Dominica where their numbers have been devastated by the fungal disease chytridiomycosis. It also used to be hunted for food, hence its unusual name. Though Critically Endangered, the giant frog is the focus of an international recovery programme incorporating captive breeding and research, field studies and eventually, it is hoped, a reintroduction programme to an area of Montserrat not yet affected by the fungal disease.