Last week the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote about the never-solved mystery of deformed frogs found in a lake in southern Minnesota. The saga of schoolchildren discovering deformed frogs in alarming numbers was one of the many environmental issues I followed while working for the Minnesota Legislature. It was disturbing, and of course many people wanted the Legislature to DO something about it. It is interesting that so few answers have ever been found. I even wove a tapestry about this mystery.
What caused the horrific deformities of frogs in the 1990s? . The answer is that researchers were never able to pinpoint the cause of the deformities. The frequency of missing limbs lessened in the lake in following years. I wrote this when I first wove the frogs in 2019. “Pretty, But Not Normal, Tapestry Frogs.”
And THEN, in our winter of no-winter in Minnesota, the paper reported that ticks have already arrived for the season. “With Minnesota’s unseasonably warm weather, ticks are back.” I wove deer ticks, now called blacklegged ticks, in the fall of 2018. Find more of my feelings about and photos of the tick tapestry here: “No Flowers on this Tapestry, Just Ticks.”
A spokesperson from the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District, Alex Carlson, mentioned in the article, “Their early emergence also could mean there might be a bumper crop of them this spring and summer.” That’s about as depressing as the lack of snow in the photo taken on our front lawn.