April is Frog Month!

Here at The Frog Bag Blog we love frogs. How much? So much that the whole darn blog is named after them! Not only the blog, but the etsy shop too! Sadly, I can't take credit for the month of April being "Frog Month" though. I'm not sure who did the leg work on that one, but I'm glad they did, since it gives me a chance to talk about these magnificent amphibians.

Believe it or not, frogs are among the most endangered animals

on the planet. They have made it through many previous extinction events (including the one that wiped out all of the non-avian dinosaurs) but will they survive humans? That remains to be seen.

So, in honor of Frog Month and our dampish frog friends, I thought I would highlight a couple of things we can do to help them out. First on the list?

Drink more tap water!

How does this help? Well, Americans alone drink somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 BILLION bottles of water a year. Most of these bottles are not even recycled. All that plastic requires a lot of oil to produce: enough to fuel a million cars for a year! And oil isn't the only thing wasted... three times more water is used in the production of each bottle than ends up inside. Most of what's inside is just processed tap water anyway, which you could do much more cheaply at home with a filter. Some "big box" brands even have higher levels of contaminates than are allowed in tap water!

So, where does this leave frogs? Well, processing oil into bottles and then transporting the bottles to shops around the country contributes tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which in turns contributes to climate change. And we all know how much frogs hate climate change! Most are adapted to only live in very narrow ranges of temperature, so even a small shift can have dire consequences. In addition, using all that extra water depletes rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs. In other words, the very places that frogs call home.

You may be wondering "why care about frogs?" Aside from the fact that frogs are unique and beautiful, they are also the muppet-like face of many important ecosystems. Save the frogs, save the planet, save ourselves. Easy as 1-2-3! Well, maybe not that easy. But at least it's a place to start...

Special thanks to Save the Frogs! for use of their photos and some of the information contained above.