How to Handle Drainage??

[Carlton]

Even though the water was the most obvious thing the storm brought, you might think about what else a storm front comes with...such as a change in the barometric pressure right before or during it, the massive saturation of humidity, and even the electrostatic pressure. I used to keep Malaysian leaf frogs and the little group of us who were trying to figure out how to breed them stumbled on an idea along these same lines. Obviously many amphibians respond to the monsoon; getting ready to spawn when there's water; but when we didn't get the breeding response by saturating their habitats alone, we knew something else was missing despite nutrition and general health. We noticed that new arrivals were often in a breeding frenzy for a couple of days and this is why there have been a few successful spawns from newly imported frogs if they were lucky enough to be healthy and set up in a suitable habitat right away. But, once that initial phase wore off we couldn't seem to trigger it again. Think about the barometric pressure shifts right before the monsoon actually arrives....and from long jet flights...a big surge or drop that doesn't really occur at other times. To test this out, we tracked the behavior of newly imported frogs, attempted to ship some long distances (with a recording barometer in the box to see if we could record what the conditions actually were), and even set up home-made low pressure situations by setting them up in bathtubs covered and with a Shop Vac sucking out the air. It worked. When I sent my breeding group across the US to an aquarium in the SE to see if they might have more luck during hurricane season (the Pacific Coast just doesn't get those huge tropical low pressure systems) I warned the staff they might see spawning immediately. Sure enough, at the end of their long flight two of the females spawned successfully and the eggs were fertilized. They ended up with several hundred tads! I don't think any survived to morph probably because figuring out what the tads need to develop isn't known either. But I was so excited and frankly, jealous!

What I meant to suggest is looking beyond the water itself and think about the other products of a major storm event.