Camouflage can be everything to an animal. For a frog, it is not the only means of defence, but like many animals preyed upon by many others, its first line of defence is silence, stillness, and hopefully the predator will pass by unwittingly. This frog was doing a very good job of hiding itself from predators, hunkered down in the mud, the light gleaming from the slime that forms a thin film over the entire muddy shoreline. I refrained from using a polarizer to cut down on the glare because the glare is such an integral part of the frog's camouflage. If the frog were in the background of this shot, you would not even know that he was there. I had to focus on the eyes, the most defining feature of this frog, in order to be able to grant the onlooker the ability to distinguish a subject among the otherwise Stygian scene.

This was taken at Murphy's Point Provincial Park in Ontario using my Sigma Zoom lens and Nikon FM2 on Fuji Film.

Frogs, and amphibians more generally, are very sensitive to environmental pollution in their environment. Scientists keep close watches on them as coal miners of old used to do with canaries in order to determine if the area is healthy or not. This healthy specimen in the photograph indicates that this particular area of Murphy's Point, and hopefully the park as a whole, is a healthy, functioning ecosystem. However, frog mutations are running rampant in North America, and their malformations include two extra hind legs or the growth of the sex organs of both male and female hermaphroditic frogs - keep in mind that being a hermaphrodite is not a great deal of fun because now you can do everything sexually, but rather these animals are sterile and useless to the continuing survival of their species. To inhibit a species' ability to reproduce is to utterly doom it to extinction, something we have done to countless millions of species already. The only other period that suffered this level of mass extinction was when the dinosaurs were wiped out; signifying mankind has officially become a worldwide disaster of epic proportions. The frog mutations are a warning to scientists that something is very wrong; the miners are deep down and the canary just collapsed: it is desperately time to get management down there to clean up the area.

For more information about the effects of pollution on frogs, which is a pertinent issue for North Americans, please read the in-depth articles at http://www.solcomhouse.com/frogs.htm.

Remember, if the canary falls...