The Digital Frog Blog

Our educational software is chock-full of information on organisms from around the world. In each Digital Field Trip we select representative organisms, provide information on each, then incorporate them into a major activity. With the beaver, it’s a Bog Food Web Game. (You can download a paper version of this activity by joining our Frogger Club.)

This is the beaver information, taken from The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands program.

BEAVER

Beavers are one of the largest rodents in the western hemisphere and can weigh up to sixty pounds. Their hind feet, webbed like a duck’s, make them powerful swimmers. A thick underlayer of hair keeps them warm and dry. All rodents have front teeth that never stop growing.

Hunting beavers for their fine furs has led to extinction in some areas. They now have protected status in many countries.

Habitat

Beavers spend most of their time in water. They can stay underwater for up to fifteen minutes.

They build a dome-shaped lodge to live in, using mud, rocks and tree branches. The lodge has entrances underwater, an internal platform above water level, and a place to store food underwater.

Beavers exert a great influence on their habitat by damming streams and creating ponds.

Behavior

Beavers work hard to dam streams, thus creating ponds that won’t freeze completely during the winter. They are skillful builders; if they run out of nearby wood for the dam, they build channels to float wood into the pond from further away! They create spillways in the dam, enlarge them to cope with heavy rain and build them up again in dry periods.

Beavers stay in the lodge for most of the day, then feed at dusk.

Life Cycle

Beavers give birth to 3-5 young in the Spring. The young are born with hair and their eyes open; they stay with their parents for up to two years.

Food Source

Beavers eat water plants and the bark and leaves of trees.

Range

Beavers are found in these areas:

Suggested Links

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Our educational software is chock-full of information on organisms from around the world that we’d like to share here as well. This is all about jaguars, taken from The Digital Field Trip to The Rainforest program.

THE JAGUAR

The word “jaguar” comes from “yaguar,” meaning “he who kills with one leap.”  Also known as “El Tigre,” the jaguar is the largest cat in the New World.  A jaguar can be as long as 2 m (6 ft), and weigh over 140 kg (300 lbs).  Its only predators are the anaconda and humans.

However, habitat loss and hunting have had a dramatic effect on jaguar populations, bringing jaguars close to extinction.  The jaguar reserve in Belize is the first of its kind.

Habitat

The jaguar lives in both lowland and mountain forests, by rivers, in jungles, savannas, mangrove swamps and moist forests.  It prefers damp areas, tracking prey by their footprints.

Each jaguar lives alone, but home ranges frequently overlap.

Behavior

The jaguar is nocturnal, stalking prey silently.  Its beautiful spotted coat provides camouflage, helping it sneak up on prey.  It is a good swimmer and can turn its front paws inward to help it grab prey.

Like most cats, it has good hearing and retractable claws.  It can roar, but not purr, and its eyes close to circles, not slits.  It has excellent sight, sees color and, at night, sees six times better than a human.

Life Cycle

A female jaguar gives birth to two or three young after a three month pregnancy.

Offspring are born blind and helpless.  They stay with their mother for one year, but do not fully mature for three years and can live up to 20 years.

Food Source

The jaguar is a carnivore and hunts vertebrates.  When it attacks, it pounces on the head or neck, and attempts to snap the spine.

A jaguar eats almost everything from a kill, including most of the bones.  It uses its side teeth to chew, because the front teeth are normally weak.

Range

Jaguars can be found in the following areas…

For more information on the jaguar and other rainforest plants and animals, take a look at The Digital Field Trip to the Rainforest. Or download a free demo of the program here.

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April 30 marks the return of Save the Frogs day. The goal is to raise awareness about the plight of frogs and how they are endangered in our world today. Around the globe, teachers, museums, zoos, artists and companies will be marking the day and doing their part to promote education about amphibians.

When we heard about it, we had to be involved.

For April 30 only, we’re offering 25% off the regular price of The Digital Frog 2.5 AND donating 25% of the proceeds to Save the Frogs.

While the virtual dissection portion of the program can save the need for using real frogs, the whole program is a wealth of information on amphibians, their anatomy and even a section on ecology including environmental concerns and the effects on frog populations.

Come back to The Digital Frog Online Shop on April 30 to place your order and save both money and donate to Save the Frogs organization. (If you are an educator, you can even place your order with a purchase order.)

For more information on Save the Frogs day (or to find or register your own event for the day), visit the Save the Frogs web site.

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The two “frog ladies” of Digital Frog recently got back from the 2010 National Science Teachers Association annual conference in Philadelphia. Response was positive, as always… but sometimes we meet people who are really glad to see us.

Case in point: teacher Lovelle Ruggiero not only enthusiastically came to visit us at our booth, she even helped us make a video of her thoughts and experiences using Digital Frog software in her school:

You can see this video (and our others) on the Digital Frog International YouTube channel.

Find us on Facebook

Looking for other ways to find out what we’re up to? We’ve just created a page on Facebook. Come on over, check it out, become our fan. We’re still adding content, but you can have a look at some pictures from the recent NSTA conference, as well as other things to come.

(Don’t forget, you can still find us on Twitter too.)

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I heard an interesting newscast the other day – it seems that researchers believe that urban noise might be affecting frog populations because female frogs cannot hear the mating calls over the cacophony of human activities.

In our frog dissection, anatomy and ecology program The Digital Frog 2.5, we address environmental concerns and the effects they have had on frog populations. Since we first published in 1995, new research has identified other possible causes, including urban noise and tiny parasites which have been found to cause damage to devloping limb buds.

It looks like it’s time to update the ecology section in The Digital Frog, part of which you can read here:

Introduction

Many scientists consider frogs important bio-indicators. Frogs have permeable skin and live both on land and in water. As a result, environmental problems quickly affect frogs. Recently, frog populations have declined or disappeared around the world, and deformities and mutations are becoming common. People have found adult frogs with misshapen bodies, extra legs, missing or abnormal organs, and even eyes growing inside mouths!

A Thousand Friends of Frogs

A Thousand Friends of Frogs Project was founded in 1995 to collect data on deformed frogs, and pass the information to research scientists. This project links students, educators, families, and scientists from around the world, and helps to educate people about frogs and their importance to us.

Possible causes

Frog deformities, mutations and declining populations are not likely to result from any single cause; it is much more probable that many factors affect our amphibian friends. Scientists have identified holes in the ozone layer, chemicals, pollution, habitat loss and frog harvesting as possible causes.

Ozone layer

Laboratory tests with ultraviolet light have produced frogs with leg deformities. Scientists speculate that holes in the ozone layer may allow enough ultraviolet light through to affect frogs in the wild.

Chemicals and pollution

Amphibian skin absorbs chemicals from both land and water. Tests show that some chemicals, pesticides, and industrial pollutants cause mutations, abnormal growth, or fatal deformities in frogs.

Industrial and agricultural by-products can harm local frogs. Acid rain and runoff rain can carry these chemicals to places far removed from human habitation.

Habitat loss and frog harvesting

Habitat loss is probably the biggest single factor in declining frog populations. Wetlands are frequently drained, filled in, or otherwise destroyed, depriving frogs of places to live. Commercial harvesting is another pressure. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of frogs are captured each year and used in laboratories, schools, and restaurants; this causes serious declines in certain species.

Did you know?

We used four frogs in the original Digital Frog and none had deformities. This version required five frogs, and we discovered internal deformities in three of them.

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We pride ourselves on making software that just works so that you can focus on the important things: teaching and learning. However sometimes things happen that are out of our hands and things may not work as smoothly as they should. If you use our software or demos on Windows and have upgraded to the latest version of QuickTime, you may have discovered this first-hand.

If you’re using QuickTime version 7.6 or later, you may encounter a problem when you try to launch our software with QuickTime not being recognized. You may be prompted that you need to install QuickTime to use the program even if you have it installed and will be unable to run the program at all. Unfortunately this effects both full and free DemoWare versions on all versions of Windows that run our programs.

Thankfully we have two pieces of good news:

1. We’re working on a fix.
2. Until then, we have a workaround solution that will allow you to run the programs. You can get full details on a support page on the QuickTime issue.

We regret if this creates any problems for our users. The cause of the issue was out of our hands. But we’re doing all we can to make things just work as they should again.

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Well I have the luxury of bringing my dogs to work with me at Digital Frog International. I think this is a blessing, but some days I am not so sure.

We had a canine team of three when Widgett, my Border Collie X pup, started coming to work with me. He joined Whiskey, a 12 year old German Shepherd and Dudley a one year old Golden Retriever. Whiskey was the office boss and took this job seriously (as any boss does) reminding the young guys to stay in line and out of her spot. Whiskey is the dog made “famous” in Digital Frog software, she is featured in the eyeshine section of The Digital Field to The Rainforest and, randomly on various Quit screens in the other programs. Sadly this spring Whisley’s age caught up with her and she is no longer patrolling our office and preventing the planes from landing on the property.

We run an educational software company and when customers call the office they can often hear the dogs “chatting” to us or to each other in the background. Dudley is very vocal and “talks” to his friends to get them to play. When not allowed to do as he pleases Dudley will think nothing of standing his ground and giving us his best back-talking woofs, and as with a toddler in trouble it is hard to not to laugh at his back barking.

With two pups in the office things aren’t always safe. A favorite thing to steal is the bubble wrap from the shipping department and just like kids they like to pop all the bubbles.

I spend a chunk of my day stepping over, around and on dogs! The young dogs love to lie under my desk and chair so I have run over stray ears,tails and feet on more than one occasion.

With Whiskey gone, a new dog was adopted from the local Humane Society for the Digital Frog security team. A handsome two year old Shepherd cross named Kado who now calls us his family. I can now bring my older dog Beemer (a clash with Whiskey) to work as well.

The canine team of four is a good one, one dog for notifying us to the imaginary cars driving up and the other three for reinforcements in case no one is really there!!

We have some messy moments, like when Dudley decided to go visiting the neighbors, uninvited. He had to have a swim in their pond and he likes to swim under water.I was so happy to find him up the road until I realized I would have my own Digital Field trip to the Wetlands in my car once he jumped in. Being a dog lover gave me no choice but to invite him into my car, sopping wet, covered in duck weed, algae and smelling like a swamp beast.

Some days are not as productive as others in our office; it depends what the dogs have on the agenda for the day. We laugh at the dogs everyday and some days wonder what we were ever thinking having four dogs, getting in the way causing mayhem and havoc. If you call our office and it sounds like a kennel, remember it is our dogs in the office.

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Since we opened our online store last year, we’ve been committed to providing the best and most secure online shopping experience for Digital Frog’s range of educational software. We provide a range of payment options to accommodate all our customers, from credit cards to Paypal to purchase orders for those of you in educational institutions.

While payments have always been processed through secure servers, we have had some customers concerned that the entire store was not hosted on a secure site. And we’ve taken those concerns to heart.

We’re happy to announce that as of today, the entire store has been upgraded to ensure that every step in the ordering process is secure and all information transmitted to us is encrypted. It’s an extra layer of security to ensure that you can feel safe placing your order through our online shop.

Photo by AMagill released under Creative Commons.

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From all of us at Digital Frog International, we want to wish you a happy new year and best wishes heading into 2009!

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My role as President of Digital Frog International and a very large garden to be cared for do not leave me much time for vacationing. However, last week, we took a few days off and headed up to Algonquin Park with some friends who are visiting from England.

For once, the weather gods were on our side and we managed to catch the fall colors at their peak, But perhaps the most special experience for me was finally getting to visit Cloud Lake. Of course I have visited it digitally hundreds of times as it is the location for The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands, but this was the first time I had actually been there.

Our developers chose the location for several reasons, not the least being the stunning scenery, which is even more beautiful in the fall. With clear blue skies and incredible colors, it was an unforgettable experience. Perhaps the most surreal experience is listening to the loons. My ever patient brother-in-law spent hours on Little Joe Lake patiently filming a surprisingly bold loon, capturing its eerie cry on tape.

As the name implies, Cloud Lake is at a fairly high elevation on the Centennial Ridges Trail, so it was a somewhat challenging climb for my poor old body, but worth every aching bone! Our goal was to secrete a metal box with several copies of The Digital Field Trip to The Wetlands for intrepid geocachers to locate using GPS technology. If you do not know about geocaching, check out www.geocache.com – it is a great way to discover out-of-the way gems that most people never find and a fabulous way to teach children about geography and nature. And plan to visit Cloud Lake soon. We intend to keep the cache stocked with CDs.

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