Squirrel Frog Natural History

This passed Thursday, our class took a field trip to Ion Swap in the Francis Marion National Park. We wondered down the path, searching through leaves and under logs, while being eaten up by very large mosquitoes, in the quest of finding a catching herps. Our efforts, in the beginning, were successful yielding a few anoles and some skinks. Then further down the path, along the side of a ditch of an old, abandoned rice field some of my fellow student struggled to catch a very slippery herp that we had not yet seen. When the dust settled, in the hands of one of my fellow students was a female squirrel frog. The squirrel frog, Hyla squirella, is a small tree frog that varies in color and ranges from east Texas to North Carolina. The frog can be found throughout most forest preferring areas where it can hide and where moisture is readily available. The large toe pads are an easy characteristic of the species family and genus but the species identification can be quite tricky. The color pattern of this species is highly variable often varying from region to region. The best way to indentify this species is to eliminate other species from the genus first. While out in the field, my fellow classmates and I learn this lesson the hard way. The species that we caught was an adult female who had the quite the knack for jumping out of our hands. When my turn came around to hold the frog, she was stressed at the point; she began to rest in here watering conserving posture, which we had just talked about in lecture the class before. Overall this frog definitely  lives up to its name.