The endangered Littlejohn's tree frog at the University of Newcastle

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Transcript

00:00So here we've been breeding the endangered Littlejohn's tree frog, that's a species that's

00:12endemic to New South Wales, so it's not found anywhere else, just in three locations from

00:18the Wadigan Mountains down to near Wollongong.

00:21So we've taken some into captivity with the hopes to breed them, both for an insurance

00:27policy, so if anything happens to their wild populations, we have some in captivity to

00:32make sure the species persists, but also with the hopes of one day releasing captively bred

00:38animals into the wild to help boost those populations, and also with the hopes to potentially cross

00:45different populations and increase their genetic diversity, because this species is impacted

00:50by inbreeding due to small population sizes.

00:54So we have some tadpoles that we have captively bred here that are growing up really nicely,

01:01and we also have some juvenile frogs that we've raised from tadpoles that we'll hopefully release

01:06back to the wild soon.