CHIMACUM — Anderson Lake was known, at least until now, for its trout and for the toxic blue-green algae that spurred public health officials to close the lake but leave the state park around it open.
For the next several days, however, the lake near Chimacum will be noticed instead for its streams of dime-sized Western toads, first noticed last week.
They’re newly metamorphosed ex-tadpoles, doing their amphibious thing and scrambling across the land around the lake — in impressive numbers.
“I was just out there yesterday, and saw a million of them heading toward the woods,” state park ranger Mike Zimmerman said Friday afternoon.
“There are no more polliwogs,” he added.
Instead, the four-legged tiny toads, between a quarter- and half-inch in body length, are “up in the woods. The ground was just absolutely alive with them.”
“It’s a pretty unique situation,” added Zimmerman, who has been manager of Fort Flagler and Anderson Lake state parks for some 14 years.
“I haven’t seen this phenomenon” in those years, he said.
This August, the toad yield appears excellent not just at Anderson Lake but around East Jefferson County.
“I’ve talked to people with ponds on their property, and they are experiencing the same thing — lots more toads,” Zimmerman said.
And at the state park, “we have created a little more visitation . . . the people who drove up made a beeline for the shore, with their cameras,” in hopes of toad photos.
The tiny toads probably are creeping all over Clallam County as well, although they haven’t received the attention of this year’s Anderson Lake amphibians.
While not having noticed the tiny toads this year, state Fish and Wildlife Officer Win Miller remembers seeing “hundreds of thousands” of them, so thick it was imposible not to step on them on the trail, in the Hoh high country.
Migrations of the western toad, or bufo boreas, are noted throughout its range, which extends from western British Colombia and southern Alaska through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana and western Wyoming to northern California, Nevada, western Colorado, and western Utah.
They are so numerous during their annual migrations in Chilliwack, British Columbia, that the city this year agreed to temporary closures of roads near a lake to allow thousands of baby toads to migrate from wetlands to forest without danger, the Vancouver Sun reported last month.
Word got out late last week that an estimated 2 million newborn toads were emerging from Anderson Lake, the ranger said.
The counter-intuitive thing about this is that the lake is considered poisonous.
It’s been closed to fishing and other waterborne recreation for all but a few weeks this year, after Jefferson County Public Health officials found anatoxin-a, a potent neurotoxin at about 100 times the level considered safe.
An algae bloom was seen in the lake Aug. 2, according to Jefferson County Public Health, which publishes water-quality reports at http://tinyurl.com/algaelake.
The toxic algae was first discovered back in spring 2006, when two dogs perished after drinking some lake water.
Yet Dr. Tom Locke, Jefferson County’s Health Officer, said this May that it’s still a mystery why Anderson Lake grows the dangerous algae.
He has also said that this lake is one of the worst, if not the worst, in Washington state.
People are still eager to go boating on Anderson Lake, Zimmerman said. They certainly don’t expect to be drinking the bad water in it.
But “if you fall out of your boat, your first reaction is to take a big gulp. We don’t want to put you at risk of getting really ill.”
At the same time, “what we have surmised is that the toxic algae is not harming the frogs,” nor the toads.
“It’s a possibility they have developed some type of immunity,” the ranger added.
“That is their world,” so perhaps it’s not surprising that the lake tadpoles can coexist with algae that isn’t good for humans or domestic mammals.
Jefferson County monitors Anderson Lake weekly, and will keep it closed as long as the visible algae blooms linger.
On land, though, hiking, bicycling and horseback riding, as well as toad-watching, are permitted.
Toadlets grow fast — a couple of millimeters a month — and by adulthood they can travel 550 meters to 2 kilometers per year, said Marc Hayes, a senior research scientist at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Hayes wasn’t terrifically impressed by the report of toadlet hordes at Anderson Lake State Park.
“It’s typical for them to metamorphose [from tadpoles] en masse,” he said.
“I think it’s a function of where you are and what you’re paying attention to.”
Tiny toads “tend to crowd together on top of each other . . . you’ll see them aggregated in large numbers for a few weeks before they slowly disperse,” Hayes added.
And those amphibian rivers “could be simply a very normal situation; normal toad production.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
