The city's passion for shopping is costing the lives of hundreds of frogs and igniting a debate for amphibian underpasses, a Fredericton man says.

The frogs live in bogs in the University of New Brunswick woodlot but at night they're migrating across a road near the new Corbett Centre shopping area in Fredericton. Ron Wilson found out that not many are making it across to the other side.

Wilson said he will never forget his drive home Sunday night when he saw green lumps all over the new road that runs through Knowledge Park. At first he thought they were piles of squished leaves scattered across his path.

"I looked closer and it was frogs, like dozens of frogs, dead, dying, run over, many live just in the middle of the road; it's a froggy carnage, really, just dead and dying frogs everywhere," Wilson said.

Wilson, who is a chef for the RCMP and an amateur naturalist, said it's been hard to shake that image of the dead frogs across the road. He posted an angry rant on an online forum for naturalists as soon as he got home.

He railed against development on ecologically sensitive land. Now e-mails of support are coming from all over the province.

Jeff Houlihan, a professor of conservation biology with an expertise in amphibians at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, said the carnage caused during frog migrations witnessed by Wilson is taken very seriously worldwide.

In Europe "they'll actually build culverts, underpasses for frogs so that they can travel under the roads and not get killed," Houlihan said.

Houlihan said the City of Fredericton should consider adopting a similar model for the area surrounding the UNB woodlot development.