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.