Endangered frog species clings to life after failed reintroduction effort

One of the nation's most ambitious wildlife reintroduction efforts has suffered a setback with the deaths of 104 mountain yellow-legged frogs that had been rescued from Southern California's fire-stripped San Gabriel Mountains in 2009, authorities said Tuesday. The federally endangered frogs, which recently metamorphosed from the tadpole stage, died in captive breeding tanks over the last several weeks at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo in Fresno, Calif. The Fresno zoo is not the only facility to have run into problems while trying to spur a jump in the population of the 3-inch amphibians. Thirty-six tadpoles have not been seen since biologists at the San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research released them a year ago into a remote San Jacinto Mountain stream from which they had been absent for a decade, zoo officials said. In 2006, seven mountain yellow-legged frogs - found three years earlier in a shallow pool in the San Bernardino Mountains after a large brush fire - died at the San Diego Zoo. Studies showed those frogs died of the same type of fungal infection that is killing frogs around the world...more

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990 and some days I look down and my legs are yellow.  But please, please don't let the gov't rescue me.   I've got plans for the future.