Saying goodbye to the frogs

As we continued working at Rio Maria, it became more important to me to take in the experience of watching the tadpoles swarming in the stream and the constant movement of small frogs scattering as I walked down the jungle trails. This place was the “zen” of frogs and it was easy to sit and meditate on them. Our discussions more frequently turned to the impending disappearance of the frogs and the prospects for saving other parts of the jungle.

While the road to the research site from El Valle was tremendously difficult, it connected with a road that came up the other side of the volcano from the coast highway. This area up high on the slopes of the volcano had seen years of agricultural use, mainly cleared jungle for pasture. This development was patchy, but now it was being converted into high priced houses and ranchettes for wealthy Panamanians. The site also attracted retirees from the US and Europe who realized their money could buy more in Panama than it could at home. The site also attracted retired “snow birds” who migrated down to avoid the cold winter, and then closed up their homes in Panama and returned to the States in the summer. The mountain sites were attractive because of the fabulous scenery and the pleasant year-round temperatures. Not as hot as the lowlands, yet never actually very cold. The land of eternal green and spring was very attractive indeed.

The bulldozers were rolling. It was obvious that development was as much of a threat to Rio Maria as the fungus that was creeping toward the frogs, but the developer claimed that the Rio Maria valley would not be developed and the valley and its wildlife would be preserved. This was good news because habitat destruction would take the majority of the plants and animals with it, leaving only the few weedy species that could coexist with humans. Diversity would be far less than in the current jungle.

Cathy Pringle needed to get back to teaching so she took a shuttle bus to the airport. After she was gone we found a pair of her dirty shoes and socks in the back of one of the pickups. It made sense, who would want to carry wet socks on a day long travel home? We now had proof of the rumors about her always leaving behind socks and we all got a good laugh out of it. Someone in El Valle would certainly put them to good use after a good washing.

We spent a lot of time training Piet, Heidi, and Edgardo who would remain behind to finish up the work and continue monitoring the stream. They needed to learn how to collect all the samples and what to do if things did not work out quite right. It was as important to teach them the concepts behind what we were doing as it was for them to learn specific technique. What if sampling is put off for a day, is that ok? What if the pump breaks and samples cannot be filtered right away? Understanding the research allows such questions to be answered. Fortunately, we could maintain contact with them via e-mail and cell phones from El Valle.

Before we left, we also tried to process as many samples as possible to take back to the US. The routine of field work associated with this type of experiment is the same regardless of the setting. Samples need to be dried and weighed, some of them ground up. Water needs to be filtered and analyzed. Voucher specimens need to be preserved for formal identification in the laboratory. Who was bringing what sample back to the states was important and it was all recorded.

The last day at Rio Maria, we turned off the tracer drip. Then we had to wait for the lines to get cleared out, so Alex and I took a walk to the stream above. It was nearing dusk and the frogs were becoming more active. On a rock in the middle of the stream we saw a smaller male golden frog perched on the back of a larger female. This behavior is called anaplexus, and is how the frogs mate. The males are reputed to ride around on the backs of the females for up to two months before an appropriate breeding site is found. I suspect that this is just legend, but you have to admire the tenacity of the male. All the while, the male strokes the female’s chest with nuptial pads on the fingers of their forelegs. This has to be the longest foreplay in the animal kingdom. Eventually the male fertilizes the eggs and the female lays them. This extraordinary courtship continued in spite of the impending demise of these frogs.

We felt like this was the last we, or anybody else, would witness this behavior of this species in the wild. The last chance to see can be profound, and Alex and I were both lost in our thoughts about what the image meant to us.

The trip back to the US from El Valle was uneventful, with a good shopping trip to an artesian market and a night at a very good seafood restaurant in Panama City. We got up very early the next morning to give us plenty of time to make our 8:00 am flight.

The flight back was ordinary; it was amusing to watch Bob talk his way through US customs with more than his allotment of liquor to avoid paying import tax. The customs guy told him not to ever do it again, but let him through. If he knew how many more bottles Bob had in his checked luggage, he might not have been so nice about it. The best strategy in customs is, never lie and never give more information than asked for. Considering we were bringing samples back into the country, even though it was completely legal to bring the types of biological samples we had back, an overzealous customs or agricultural products inspector could delay us long enough to cause us to miss the next flight out.

Before I knew it, we were back in the US and into the world of strip malls and fast food. Culture shock, even though we were only gone for a couple of weeks, still make a mark. The main objectives of the project now fell to Matt and Piet. Matt needed to obtain more funding to repeat the trip after the disease swept through Rio Maria and the El Valle region, and Piet needed to work through most of the samples we brought back. I had my expensive bottles of rum, a batch of digital photos, and memories of Panama, El Valle, and the frogs of Rio Maria.

Our first task on the project after returning was to obtain funding to get back to Panama and complete our experiment. We agreed that we would find a way to bootleg the work out of other projects if we needed to, but could not do as good of a job without substantial research funding. This job fell to Matt because he was the leader and wrote the first grant. He was a bit spoiled because the first grant had been funded the first time it was submitted, and it was also the first grant he had submitted to the National Science Foundation as lead investigator. Such success is rare, but we were optimistic about requesting the next round of funding. The additional funding seemed highly deserved because of the urgent nature of the research, the unique and powerful angle of using the nitrogen tracer experiments to test how the effects of tadpole extinctions in the streams cascade through the rest of the ecosystem, Matt’s skill at grant writing, and the assistance of the rest of the group.

The next deadline for grant applications was 5 months after our return and Matt wrote the proposal and circulated it around to the rest of the group for their input via email. Writing a grant proposal such as this is not a trivial amount of work. The body of the proposal was 15 single-spaced pages, and including all the necessary information to satisfy the dozen or so reviewers in this length of document is quite a trick. Completion of many pages of forms is also required and every detail of the proposal must have references from the scientific literature to verify statements and show that adequate procedures will be used. Multiple investigators from multiple institutions requires numerous budgets each with their own requirements and bureaucracies that need to be navigated for many signatures. After a long process, the proposal was polished up and submitted. Then we had to wait for the 5-6 months it takes for grant proposals to be processed.