Fun with Science Club®


			Can building a pond make up for the real thing? Carrie Straight 05.14.01 During construction of new buildings, subdivisions, and roads, people fill wetlands in the name of progress. By law, some of those people have to make a new wetland to replace the one they fill. The creation of a new wetland mitigates (replaces or alleviates) the loss of another, also called wetland mitigation. One question scientists have with wetland mitigation, is whether these new areas are doing a good job at replacing the one that was destroyed. Scientists from the southeastern United States decided to see how the local amphibian population was doing around one of these mitigation ponds. To find out if there were differences in the amphibian populations around a natural pond or a newly made pond, they set up traps for catching amphibians around both types of ponds. They identified each animal caught in the traps, measured it, and marked it so that they could if they had captured it before. The scientists captured some amphibians that had once been at the old wetland pond. The various kinds of amphibians at the new ponds differed from those at the original site. These differences probably occurred because the original site dried out every year and the new ponds were permanent. The differences between created ponds and natural ponds make it difficult for wetland mitigation to replace lost wetlands and wetland ponds.


			Pechmann, Joseph H. K., Ruth A. Estes, David E. Scott, and J. Whitfield Gibbons. 2001. Amphibian colonization and use of ponds created for trial mitigation of wetland loss. Wetlands 21(1): 93-111.