California red-legged frog tadpoles were released into a site in the Santa Monica Mountains on May 12, 2026, raised at a new Santa Barbara Zoo facility built to give the state’s official amphibian a head start.
The species (Rana draytonii) is federally threatened and had been gone from those mountains for decades. Getting it back has taken more than ten years.
Two ways to move a frog
The recovery project works by translocation: taking portions of egg masses from populations that are holding and moving them into historic territory where the species has been lost, in the hope of establishing breeding populations.
What is new is the step in the middle. The program now headstarts as well, raising eggs and tadpoles in managed care through the stages where mortality is highest and releasing them further along.
The reason for adding that step is specific to the last few years. Reintroduction sites in the Santa Monica Mountains were hit hard by the 2018 Woolsey Fire, and severe storms have followed. An egg mass left in a creek that then burns or floods is a total loss; the same egg mass in a tank is not.
The facility that made it possible
The Santa Barbara Zoo now runs a conservation space at California State University Channel Islands, and it is the reason this cohort exists at all.
National Park Service biologists collected an egg mass in the Santa Monica Mountains on March 4 and brought it to the CSUCI facility, where zoo animal care staff monitored the tadpoles through their most fragile stages before the release in May.
“The new pilot facility at CSU Channel Islands has been a gamechanger for our conservation programs,” said Dr. Estelle Sandhaus, vice president of conservation and science at the Santa Barbara Zoo. “For the first time, we were able to hatch and raise a cohort of California red-legged frog tadpoles in a dedicated conservation space, giving us much-needed capacity.”
Students at CSUCI work alongside it.
“This work highlights the power of place-based conservation in our own backyard,” said Allison Alvarado, associate professor of biology at CSU Channel Islands. “Through this partnership, CSU Channel Islands students are able to connect directly with ongoing recovery efforts.”
Why this frog
The California red-legged frog is the state amphibian and the largest native frog in the western United States. It once occurred across much of California and was lost across most of that range to habitat degradation, invasive species and disease.
Headstarting is doing the same work for other threatened natives. Loveland Living Planet Aquarium released aquarium-raised western toads in southern Utah last year, and the Detroit Zoo shipped 6,855 Puerto Rican crested toad tadpoles to the island in June. Both do what this program does: carry animals past the stage where almost all of them die.
Amphibians are indicator species: permeable skin, eggs laid in water, a life cycle that straddles land and water. What happens to water quality happens to them first. A landscape that can hold red-legged frogs again is telling you something about the landscape, not only about the frogs.
“The California red-legged frog recovery project has been underway for more than a decade, and while we’ve seen encouraging success, some of our reintroduction sites were heavily impacted by the 2018 Woolsey Fire,” said Dr. Katy Delaney, the National Park Service wildlife ecologist who leads the project. “We are hopeful these tadpoles will mature and help establish resilient new populations of this federally threatened species in the Santa Monica Mountains.”
