Argentinas Restaurant
Dear Boss,
As you requested, I am providing you with the information on the species that I chose to preform a selective breeding experiment with. The species is called the Chiricahua Leopard Frog, and here is it's family tree:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Craniata
Class: Amphibia
Order: Anura
Family: Ranidae
Genus: Rana
These frogs are well adapted to their environment, here are a few examples to support my theory:
- They consume their food by living near fresh water and eating aquatic organisms to provide for their hunger. They have teeth and long, forked tongue to help them eat their prey.
- The skin color of these frogs help them to become invisible to their surroundings which are usually forests and bodies of water. Their skin color consists of the colors brown, olive, and grey with spots, which are colors that fit in well with their surroundings.
- These frogs do their mating at specific times of the year. They mate mainly during the months of February through June and have as 800-1500 eggs per frog. They then metamorphasize during the summer and produce tadpoles.
I have chosen the Leopard frog as my endangered species to experiment with for selective breeding because I believe that it would make business boom for us. With the increasing demand for frog legs, we will have the perfect solution to breed them ourselves so that we can meet with the expectations of our customers, instead of having to say that we have run out. Also, we could maybe offer frog legs year around if we were able to provide the environment that these frogs need to mate.
This selective breeding process would take time, but please understand that it will be time well spent. We would have to travel to Arizona, New Mexico, and maybe as far as Mexico to get the supply of these frogs that we would need. We would need to do extensive research to figure out what exact environment they would need to live in, in order for them to mate year around. The temperature would play a role as well as their surroundings. We would have to make sure that we get an even number of males and females, as well as their food they consume. We would have to make sure that we have all the "supplies" these frogs will need to survive comfortably. Once the frogs are able to produce their tadpoles and for the tadpoles to grow into a good size of frog, then we will realise that this process will be worth all of our time that we invest in it. We can then continue this process until the demand for frog legs goes down.
While I have listed all these reasons why we should do this selective process with the Chiricahua Leopard Frog, there are some concerns that some will have if they find out of our experiment, these frogs are indeed on the near extinction list, so if we take what few there are let to sell to eat, then we may loose the species altogether. But on the other hand, our business would be booming! There is a possibility that we might, since our knowledge is not that in depth on these kinds of frogs, accidentally get a different kind of frog that looks just like the leopard frog, but is not. This could cause our frog legs to taste different and our customers might not like them. This is why we need to educate ourselves first to make sure we get the right kind of frog.
I believe that this will be the best process to go through to get the business back on the charts. We will be making plenty of profit to reimburse us of the fees for this selective breeding process. I hope you give this proposal some serious thought, and thank you for your time.
Your assistant,
Kirby Young
Amphibia Web
Nature Serve Explorer
http://www.natureserve.org/explorer/index.htm
