NAPLES — Becky Speer steps out of her minivan into darkness and
stands on the side of a long dirt road, her arms motionless at
her side and her ears in overdrive. "There we go! There we go!"
whispers Speer, who wears mosquito netting over her face and a
long-sleeved T-shirt with "Save the Frog" across the front.
"Hear them?" She points into the woods, toward the source of
frog calls that soon are pouring through the night air. They
remind her of cowbells, she said. Before the night ended, Speer,
a 60-year-old naturalist at the Naples Preserve, and her frog
monitoring partner, Naples Zoo zookeeper Heidi Hauch, 38,
repeated the same routine at a dozen spots in East Naples on the
last summer monitoring trip of 2012. The route is one of 23 in
Collier, Lee and Charlotte counties where volunteers have
collected more than 10,000 bits of data for Frog Watch, the
Southwest Florida Amphibian Monitoring Network, since it was
founded in 2000 to keep track of frog and toad populations as
new roads, houses and shopping cen