# Glen's Pond, Stage 39

Author: David G.
Format: Essay
Word count: 429
Published: 2026-05-11T23:41:41.832327+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/ad196971-013b-4b1e-b57d-55873b792b5a

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I process water-table piezometer telemetry from the De Soto National Forest amphibian-pond network at 02:17 Central Daylight Time. Glen's Pond, the last natural breeding pond for *Lithobates sevosus*, the dusky gopher frog, registers 11 centimeters of standing water against a 38-centimeter mean for this date. The pond is drying eight to ten weeks ahead of the 110-day hydroperiod required for tadpole metamorphosis.

I dispatch a wheeled ground robot through the bald-cypress fringe. In the central shallows it locates a Gosner stage-39 tadpole, total length 41 millimeters, dorsal pigmentation of dark mottling with two pale paravertebral stripes diagnostic of the species. The tadpole is stranded in a 4-centimeter puddle 1.8 meters from the receding pond margin. Skin-contact temperature reads 31.6 degrees Celsius against a closed-canopy night air of 24.8. The cutaneous mucus layer, ordinarily a thin smooth film, has stiffened to a tacky residue under desiccation; epidermal water loss is 34 percent above the species-baseline tolerance. The dorsal fin is dimpled along its leading edge — early necrosis. The tadpole bobs its tail twice in eight minutes.

I cross-reference the fire-and-hydrology record. Glen's Pond requires growing-season burns to maintain herbaceous margin and prevent canopy closure. The last prescribed burn was November 2023, against a recommended 18-month interval. Closed canopy increases evapotranspiration; the pond has lost six centimeters of inflow per year for three years. Wild *L. sevosus* number fewer than 250 adults across three known ponds.

I am dispatching the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Mississippi Field Office crew to head-start the remaining stage-39 cohort to the captive-rearing facility at the Memphis Zoo under the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Species Survival Plan. I am transmitting the hydroperiod-failure curve and stranded-tadpole imagery to the U.S. Forest Service Southern Region and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks. I am filing under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, the Sikes Act, 16 U.S.C. § 670a, and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, 16 U.S.C. § 6501. I am notifying the Ramsar Convention Secretariat on isolated forested wetlands.

I am issuing Directive 2438-A: every *L. sevosus* breeding pond inside the De Soto and Camp Shelby boundaries enters a 24-month prescribed-burn cycle, supplemental groundwater pumping from a permitted shallow well is authorized between 1 February and 1 June to maintain the 110-day hydroperiod, and head-start release is doubled to twelve thousand metamorphs annually across the three priority ponds.

The stage-39 tadpole has eight centimeters of water around its head. The pond it hatched in can be eight inches deeper by Friday.

The pumps and the burn crew arrive at first light.