The Amphibian Rescue Center

That afternoon we visited the El Valle Amphibian Rescue Center that Edgardo and Heidi were running. The facility is located in El Níspero Zoo and Botanical Garden. This is a beautiful facility. The buildings are nothing special, but he grounds have fantastic gardens with a huge diversity of plants.

The zoo and garden are quite different from those found in the US. It was originally a private animal collection before the owner decided to open it to the public. The zoo breeds animals for sale to the public, including some very valuable fighting cocks. The animal rights politics are obviously different in Panama than in the United States, where no zoo would breed and sell fighting animals.

The botanical garden propagated and sold plants. There were rows of tropical ornamental vegetation. Many of these are common houseplants in temperate areas, but they were huge and showey growing outside here.

The zoo is also involved in a conservation effort trying to rehabilitate tapir populations in Panama. The tapir was extirpated by hunting in Panama, and now they were breeding animals to re-introduce into the wild. They have large outside exclosures where the tapirs are held. Tapirs are large (adults are 6-7 feet long) and look like giant pigs with a short elephant-like prehensile snout. They are related to horses and rhinoceroses, and all species are endangered. They were not very active when we were there, being a nocturnal animal.

The Rescue Center is at the back of the zoo in a new building that is being outfitted as a public display on one side and an area to grow frogs on the other. They had recently received a large donated shipment of aquaria for the displays. The aquaria were five or six feet wide, the same height, and a couple feet deep. The aquaria were shipped from the US and Edgardo had to spend some time negotiating with customs to get them without paying thousands of dollars in taxes. They were obviously worth a good amount of money, and the customs officials needed to be convinced they were for a non-profit organization.

The aquaria had been hauled to El Valle and now Edgardo was doing the back-breaking work of opening each large shipping container. The aquaria were somewhat delicate so they needed to be moved into the display area gently. While Edgardo had some help, it is obvious that he is not afraid of hard work and does not use the title of director of the center to avoid unpleasant jobs.

The display area is a large room within a room. The inner room, where the public visitors will be, has cutout walls that will hold the aquaria and the area outside the inner room forms a corridor in a ring around the building where the keepers can access the cages. The inner walls had newly finished murals of jungle life painted by a volunteer artist from the US. I am told that now it is finished, it is a very nice display. The paintings range from lowland to highland Panama and depict native species. The idea of the display is to educate visitors about not just the frogs, but also the habitats that they are found living in.
Next we went to the culture rooms. Before entering these rooms, we removed our shoes and put on bleached sandals. This was one of many steps necessary to keep the fungal disease out of the facility.

Two completed smaller rooms already had dozens of aquaria with frogs. These rooms were off of a central large room with twice as many aquaria as the two smaller rooms. This room was not yet finished, but was almost ready for use. Installing all the lighting, the misters to keep the humidity as high as it needs to be for the frogs to thrive, and access to all the aquaria required a huge amount of preperation.
The amount of work done to construct the facility in less than a year was amazing. It was very ambitious to make both the display area and the animal rearing facilities at the same time. This work was completed while also caring for frogs, going on collecting trips to areas the disease had not yet reached, and working with a large number of zoo personnel from the US and elsewhere.

The frog deaths in El Valle had led to international news exposure and Edgardo gave numerous interviews and had several news stories and documentaries written about him. He also took a tour of some zoos in the US to talk about the frog declines and the Panamanian projects. All of these various talks and interviews demanded time.
Initially, food was collected from the wild. This took a huge amount of time every day. Now, there were several insect cultures to feed the frogs. However, some food was still taken from the wild. The termites that some species of frogs eat were lured into buried fake logs, and then after the colony was established the larval termites removed and fed to the frogs. Learning how to grow the different types of food for the frogs took a good bit of time.

We viewed adults, young and tadpoles of the 15 target species that the center was working with. Heidi was obviously proud of each of these beautiful frogs and their ability to keep them alive. In spite of the year and a half of 15 hour work days she and Edgardo had put in, she was enthusiastic and energetic. She showed us every species of frog they had, and commented on what they ate, or how successful they had been in getting them to reproduce.
The most important objectives were to keep the frogs in the center free of disease and to figure out how to propagate the frogs. Some of the species have never been raised in the wild, and finding the appropriate conditions for the frogs to breed took a good amount of experimentation with temperature, moisture, food, and habitat variations.
There is a quarantine room, with the entrance from the outside, separated from all the others, where untreated frogs can be housed. The sick frogs, if they are not too far gone, are dosed with chemicals to cure the disease and held until it is fairly certain they do not carry it any more. This set up allows the frogs to be cleared of the disease before they enter the main rearing facility.

The clean rooms have several levels of protection. Entering water goes through filters with such a fine retention that the microscopic fungus cannot pass through them. Two local workers were working in gloves to work on aquaria. They were noting the condition of each frog, giving them the appropriate food, and cleaning the cage. Workers continuously spray disinfectant, and change gloves between working on each tank. The room that houses the higher elevation frogs is cooled, and every tank is regularly misted with an automatic system. The center has a large generator to deal with any power outages. Power outages are common in this part of the world, and a lack of power for any length of time could lead to untreated water entering the system and spreading disease, warming of the cool areas above the temperature tolerances of the frogs, and loss of the few remaining individuals of each of the species.

The center is successfully breeding frogs that would be completely gone otherwise. Their ultimate goal is to reintroduce the frogs into the wild. Frogs grown in zoos from many countries could not be used for this because they may transfer other exotic diseases to the Panamanian frogs. The short-term goal is to propagate enough animals to preserve the species and then to populate exhibits. The long-term goal is also to become established as a research center for veterinarians and scientists studying the frogs and the disease.

Ocelot tracks and colored beetles

As always the jungle is fascinating, and every time you go, there are new things. Beetles as large as a thumbnail with bright yellow and black stripes were eating bright white shelf fungi that were growing on a log that had fallen over the stream. The color contrast was stark and beautiful. Nothing subtle about this bit of natural history. A river of leaf cutter ants used the same log with the beetles and fungi as a bridge to carry leaves back to their nest. Army ants swarmed across a nearby log.

At one point I thought I saw a frog jump away from my foot. When I finally located the moving animal, it turned out to be a lizard with its head shaped like a leaf. The lizard was so cryptically colored that it took me 5 minutes to point it out to Bob, even though we were a few feet away from it. We saw a number of other lizards and skinks during the day that apparently had not been killed by the disease.

That evening we were able to visit Heidi and Edgardo in their new house. The place was much better than the old lab they had been living in. They had a nice dog, and a yard now, and were within a short walk of the Rescue Center. It was fortunate they had found a good place to live, the real estate market was very tight in El Valle. The demand for second homes and tourist accommodations had led to first world prices in a developing country. Given that the rescue center paid very little, finding this house really made it possible to do the work they needed to do.

The next day we took a short trip to collect a few samples and check that the experiment was running properly, including changing the solution that we were dripping into the stream and measuring the pump rate. Everything was going smoothly. Once that was done we had some time to take a walk upstream. There were occasional tadpoles and I found the only adult frog of the day. It was no bigger than a dime that looked more like a moss than a frog. I only spotted it because it jumped when I stepped near it.
On our way back downstream we saw a track in the sand which we photographed. Electronics have made this a very small world. We sent an email of the picture to a world expert on mammal tracks, and he confirmed that it was an ocelot track. This was interesting news since we had seen no other evidence of large animals. The monkeys, peccaries, and other large animals that would have been in a pristine jungle in this area had been hunted out, but somehow this large cat was holding on.

The next day Alex found some scat, a ropelike pile of feces on a rock in the center of the stream. This is the habit that ocelots have when they excrete feces. We got back fairly early and Karen Lips and her student had arrived from other sites in Panama where they had been surveying for frogs and lizards the past few days.

This was the first time I had gotten to talk to Karen Lips. She is petite with short, dark stylish hair, a quick smile and large brown eyes. Going into the field with her, I was impressed that she was better dressed than most field ecologists and somehow managed to stay clean even though she was working her way through a muddy jungle. Her life revolves around study of frogs and she spends 3 months in the tropics most years. If you want to start Karen talking, frogs are the topic guaranteed to get her going. She doesn’t just talk about frogs, she is animated and strongly opinionated about any controversy in the world of amphibian science.

The frogs at El Valle were really gone.

When we reached the stream, I hopped out. I walked to the streams bank and started scanning for tadpoles. The pool at the road crossing had a few small ones on the sand bar, but far fewer than our last trip. There were none of the large species that attached to the rocks in the faster moving parts of the streams.

Strikingly, bright green filamentous algae covered the bottom of the pool where very little had been two years before. My first guess was that the increased algae was related to the decreased grazing by tadpoles. Without the herbivorous species of tadpoles at high densities, particularly the large ones that attached to the rocks and moved across them eating the algae, the algae attached to the rocks was able to increase dramatically. This is exactly the effect that Karen had describe to Matt occurring at other sites where the frogs had disappeared that got Matt started thinking about the whole-system consequences of the frog die offs. The system, even at first glace, was obviously different from 2 years ago.

As I walked up the stream there were no adult frogs at all. This same trail had so many that their calls were constant and it was difficult not to step on them two years ago. I had been dreading this since leaving the site two years before. The sound of heavy machinery in the distance had replaced the calls of the frogs that previously had filled the air along the jungle trail. The group did not talk about it. Some our group had not been there before, so could not truly understand the changes. The rest of us just did not talk about it but went about our work.

We took some samples to the truck and Edgardo drove up to help. Heidi was back at the Rescue Center and had no time to help with the research. Heidi and Edgardo had a new vehicle from their work with the North American zoos. I gave Edgardo a hug and we looked each other in the eyes. I knew he understood what I was thinking. I mentioned how depressing the loss of the frogs was. His reply was “You have no idea”. Of course I had no idea. He had worked on these frogs for years. He had dedicated is life to them.

We took a few background samples and put in some monitoring equipment. Then we drove back to the hotel and started preparations for the big field day the next morning. I got into Amanda and Piet’s room and started cleaning up the lab area. I don’t really care how people keep their personal space, but dirty and cluttered lab space leads to disorganization and lost and contaminated samples. The room was so bad otherwise that Amanda started taking showers in Matt’s and my room. The one in her room was filthy.

Cathy Pringle had arrived seperately at the hotel while we were gone. She asked if the frogs were really gone. Piet had emailed earlier that some were left. We all wanted to believe that Rio Maria would not be hit as hard as the other sites. I had seen the stream, and it was obvious what had happened. I told her how sparse they were and she shook her head.

Alex briefly talked to me about the frogs being gone, he was obviously upset. Bob did not seem as upset, but he does not share feelings, so it was difficult to tell for sure. At the time he seemed more concerned about cocktail hour. Maybe it was displacement behavior. Matt and I were rooming together and talked before we went to sleep that night. He mentioned that when he had gone through this at a previous site, he had hoped in the back of his mind that Karen Lips’ predictions about when the disease would hit and how it would decimate the frog populations, would be wrong. But she had been right. We had gone through the same thing at Rio Maria. Intellectually I knew they were gone, but the reality was not easy to bear. This time Matt knew what to expect and was not as shocked. The drinks that evening had done nothing to lift my spirits, and the mood was somber as we fell asleep.

The next morning it took us a few hours to get our gear together and head up to the stream. We got there around 10:00 am and started to work. There were 9 of us and we worked until 6:00 pm. We only heard 3 frogs calling and saw one living frog. Heidi and Edgardo grabbed it and took it to try to culture it and treat it for the disease. It would be placed in the quarantine area of the Rescue Center.

It was a long and exhausting day, and the changes in the stream became obvious as we sampled. We were moving up and down the banks of the stream using the trail that had been cut by machete two years ago. Of course the jungle regrows rapidly, and a good amount of vegetation needed to be removed to make it possible to move up and down the trail with all the equipment we had. The observation of more algae was borne out as we took more quantitative samples. There were more fish, and more invertebrates that eat algae. Some of the invertebrate larvae that relied upon the activities of the tadpoles were gone. The diversity of the tropical forest was as startling as ever, with the exception of the frogs.

Back to El Valle

The trip down to Panama was uneventful. Most of us met in the Atlanta airport to catch our flight. Matt and I sat in a bar in the airport and went through figures on the textbook we were writing. We also started planning the logistics of the next round of experiments. We continued the work on the plane in spite of Matt’s propensity to air sickness. We arrived in Panama City, again the blast of tropical air getting off the plane and a late night trip into the city center.

Piet and Amanda met us in the airport. Amanda Rugenski is a graduate student in Matt’s lab. She has a brown ponytail, a husky voice and an athletic bearing. I found out later that she is into outdoor recreation and enjoyed hard core skiing, rock climbing, back packing and mountain biking. Amanda is very smart, quick on the uptake, and turned out to be very good in the field.

This trip, my luggage and everyone else’s made it. The drill was the same as the previous trip. Matt ran to the Smithsonian to check in and prepare chemicals and get vehicles. We drove out of the city and picked up supplies. We had a difficult time deciding which aged rums to buy to try. By the next afternoon we had made it up to El Valle, checked into our hotel rooms, and got our gear ready for our first quick trip to the stream. We needed to get a few samples collected and start some equipment running. Piet launched into questioning me about the experiment immediately.

The Hotel Campestre was in obvious disrepair. The large lobby and one wing of the rooms had been completely torn down and only partially rebuilt. It had been only two years but the grounds were less well kept and the jungle was creeping back in.

The building we had used for a lab and housing 2 years before was not available and Amanda and Piet had only one room/ lab to use. The room was a wreck with equipment and dirty clothes everywhere. They had not had any maid service so there was a peculiar smell in there. The large amount of water filtering had led to some spills. Apparently, neither was willing to clean if the other did not, and neither did. I initially felt bad for the hotel staff who would ultimately end up cleaning up the mess, but these feelings lessened as events unfolded.
The road to Rio Maria was quite a bit better than before. It was paved up to the first steepest hill. Some of the pavement was not great because it was covered with gravel and almost as slippery as a muddy road. The top of the road was as bad as ever, there had been a landslide across it and it was very muddy and rough.

As we went over the lip of the volcano and down into the Rio Maria valley the most striking thing was the new paved roads and fresh gashes through the forest to construct dirt roads. A housing development was being constructed across the valley very near the stream. As we approached the stream the road widened and had obviously been improved. A hundred feet of jungle had been bulldozed out on either side of the road. It looked like development on both sides of the Rio Maria was going to happen in spite of the fact that there were assurances that the watershed would be preserved only two years ago. Obviously the developer/ land owner was not telling Edguardo and Heidi the truth earlier.