A phone call in the cold Midwest

Twenty eight years after my trip to Costa Rica, I was sitting in my office in Kansas with the cold fall wind finding its way through the large cracks in my north-facing window. The Costa Rica trip was why I decided to become an ecologist. An ecologist is a scientist who studies plants and animals, as opposed to an environmentalist who is an activist to protect the environment. I am both, but chose this path instead of becoming a molecular biologist because of my tropical ecology experiences as a young undergraduate. Sitting behind a computer was a far cry from my romantic notion of a tropical field ecologist.

My friend and colleague Matt Whiles phoned me from his office at Southern Illinois University to ask for some help with a research project he had on frogs in Panama. He had described his research on effects of population declines of frogs previously and I was already interested. Now he needed help in areas that I was a specialist in to further examine the ecological effects of frog extinctions in Central America.

Matt explained once again how frogs were disappearing in the cool, high-elevation rain forests of Panama. He had been telling this story for a while, and the fact that the frogs were going was just part of the issue. Matt was worried about what would happen to the rest of the stream organisms when the frogs were gone. At this point hearing about the species extinctions was like hearing of the death of the aunt of a friend. It was about someone you never met. It was too bad, but there was a distance between me and the actual event.

Matt mentioned that algae populations had exploded in streams where the frogs had already vanished. He hypothesized the loss of frogs was responsible for the changes in the streams because the frogs laid their eggs in or near the streams and their tadpoles grew up in the streams.

From a scientific point of view this was very interesting to me; algae are central to how many streams work. We started talking experimental design and who else would be involved. We settled on a method to analyze ecosystem functions that we had earlier used successfully on tallgrass prairie streams in the Flint Hills of Kansas and started discussing travel dates and research plans. In retrospect this is how many scientists deal with tragedy, they compartmentalize and study it-- perhaps to avoid personalizing it.

An inkling of a problem

This is a travelogue, a research log, and most of all an extinction log. It describes two research trips to gauge the effects of loss of frogs caused by a fungal disease that is sweeping through Central America. The story is one of extinction, and how people who study these animals respond to the loss. The story is a wake for lost diversity; we will never see these many species of frogs again in the wild. The blog also places the loss in the cultural context of Panama and the ecological context of the rain forest

In 1977, I visited the Costa Rican cloud forest preserve, Monteverde. The small park headquarters had an aquarium that contained a Golden Toad. I did not know at the time that this species was doomed to extinction. The animal was a beautiful, brilliant neon orange frog (Bufo periglenes), about 2 inches long. A staff person at the headquarters mentioned that this species had only been found in this one small area of this cool, wet, and high-altitude forest. He said that very few had been seen recently and we would be very lucky if we saw some in the wild. I had this in the back of my mind as we left to explore the cloud forest, but our main objective was to see the extravagantly colored Resplendent Quetazal, a bird with a two foot long bright green tail. I saw screaming monkeys, I was chased by a giant cat weasel (Jaguarondi). I never saw the frog in the wild.

In 1989 the last Golden Toad was seen, none have been reported since then. The news gradually filtered out through the scientific community that the toad was extinct, but the exact cause was not understood. Monteverde is a pristine cloud forest at the top of a mountain range; it was not developed, and should not have had much human influence. Yet, this extinction was to become emblematic; loss of this species was for many the beginning of general scientific awareness of a global trend of amphibian extinction. The extinction of the Golden Toad bewildered and saddened me, and came to mind when reading the articles that started surfacing in the 1990’s about amphibian extinctions elsewhere in the world. Little did I know that my experience with frog extinction would become very real in future years.