Three years ago, when students in Cindy Reinitz’s Nature Studies class at Minnesota New Country School visited a nearby wildlife refuge, they noticed that many of the frogs they saw had deformed or missing limbs.
“At first, we were blaming each other, saying,`Who stepped on these frogs?”‘ Reta Bovee, now 14, recalls. “Then we realized that half of the frogs we found were somehow deformed.”
Reta and her classmates took photos of the frogs and took one back to school. They posted the photos on the Internet and made calls to local environmental groups.
“We were thinking of all these questions, like, what was causing this? Was it a herbicide or pollution? Was it affecting other animals?” Reta says.
The group’s discovery drew local and national press and the attention of environmental experts. The kids even were invited to testify before the state legislature.
“They received some grant money from the legislature to purchase frog survey equipment to keep investigating the problem,” school adviser Dee Thomas says.
For Reta, who hopes to someday be a zoo biologist, the experience has been a confidence builder. “It’s not like a bunch of people saw frogs and didn’t do anything,” she says. “We asked questions and now we’re helping to find the answers.”