I noticed this interesting article just now: Primer sapo concho puertorriqueño nacido a través de fertilización in vitro • WIPR It's in Spanish, but if you translate it it tells how several researchers collected semen from 6 wild male toads and sent them back to the Fort Worth Zoo to fertilize females kept behind the scenes. The resulting offspring will be reintroduced back into the wild. Another interesting point I didn't realize about the toad, they have the longest-running continuous reintroduction program of any amphibians with more than 510,000 toads being reintroduced into the wild since 1992. ~Thylo
Hopefully some of the animals bred this way could stay into the breeding-program to bring in some new blood-lines this way. With more then half a million animals already released, does the program show already some ( possitive ) results ?
Honestly I don't know. I meant to ask that myself last night actually but I was in a rush so I forgot. With almost a million animals having been released across six protected sites on the island, it's a little crazy to me that the species isn't considered to be a bit better off. ~Thylo
Note that the releases are mostly of tadpoles, which are placed into artificially-created ephemeral breeding pools. So it isn't the same as having released hundred of thousands of adult animals because mortality amongst newly-metamorphosed animals in the wild would be high (there are many introduced predators on the island, including Cane Toads). From what I gather there haven't really been any proper surveys done of the main wild populations, probably because the toads spend most of the time underground (they live in karst country). I'd imagine the easiest way to assess the population would be monitoring the breeding sites.
