THANE’S FIELD NOTES

Panamanian Golden Frog

(Atelopus zeteki)

If you have never held a common leopard frog, with its strikingly beautiful striped and shiny skin, you have missed one of life’s great joys. Unfortunately, today, you would be lucky to hear a leopard frog calling, much less catch one.

There are many reasons for this, most of which people do not really understand. All around the globe, amphibians are under pressure—kind of like slimy canaries in the coal mine, warning us of hazards that we should heed before it is too late. Some blame climate change. Some blame UV exposure. But one thing for sure is that many amphibians are being killed by a chytrid fungus, chytrid being short for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which attacks keratin in the dermal tissue of amphibians and suffocates them since they breathe through their skin. Scientists believe the fungus originated in Africa and was transported around the world in the 1930s by accident before anyone knew it even existed. It came on the backs of African frogs exported for medical research and the pet trade.

Infected frogs can be treated if you capture them and give them a special antifungal bath in captivity. Unfortunately, though, you can’t treat the frogs and release them back into the wild, where the fungus is literally growing everywhere in some areas.

Perhaps the most dramatic amphibious rescue effort anywhere is one now famous in west-central Panama, where the very last of the golden frogs cling to life. The frogs, which have radiant orange-gold skin, have long been an important symbol of pride for Panamanians. The ancient indigenous people even considered them to be totems of prosperity and virility. Besides being valued for their folklore and beauty, the golden frogs happen to be important members of the region’s ecosystem, as they primarily prey on mosquitoes and crop pests.

In an effort to protect this beautiful amphibian from extinction, a handful of sweaty and tireless conservationists set up a “frog Hilton,” literally inside a hotel. The idea was to capture the endangered frogs in the nearby rain forest, cleanse them with the special bath, and then keep them in this quarantined hotel so they didn’t die from the lethal fungus. What began as a very temporary rescue effort, eventually ended up taking up four rooms in the hotel and housing more than two hundred threatened frogs, along with the additional areas needed for food storage, volunteer staff, and expedition preparations.

This fascinating Hotel Campestre is also a favorite overnight destination for backpackers because of its immediate proximity to the forests and mountains at the edge of a dormant volcano’s crater, about fifty miles southwest of Panama City. The two principal players in this unusual frog spa are Edgardo Griffith, a Panamanian biologist who has worked for years with endangered amphibians, and Heidi Ross, a Wisconsin native who first came to Central America as a Peace Corps volunteer. When they go searching, they often find more dead frogs than live ones, but they refuse to give up. After a year in the Campestre, the collection of frogs totaled more than two dozen species, all of them threatened by the fungus.

So this remote hotel became somewhat of a phenomenon for hikers and tourists as the legend grew that if you wanted to hear the raucous calls of male frogs, this was your last, best shot. Ross and Griffith ended up experts in amphibian husbandry—fixing filters and air pumps, as well as rearing tadpoles and various-size crickets and other insects to feed their brood. All the while, there was the nagging challenge of the long term. How would two people and a borrowed hotel make this work over the long haul? After all, Campestre couldn’t house these frogs forever—and yet it wasn’t safe to release them into the wild, where they would surely become infected.

Enter Bill Konstant and the Houston Zoo. Bill is the director of science and conservation for the zoo, and was able to rally support for the golden frog efforts. The support came in the form of volunteers and funding from numerous American zoos and botanical gardens, including the Buffalo Zoo, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and Rhode Island’s Roger Williams Park Zoo. Amphibian experts not only joined the rescue mission but also helped to design the special facility that would hold the frogs and toads after their temporary stay at the Campestre. The new facility, called the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center (EVACC), opened in 2007 and is located on the grounds of the El Nispero Zoo.

Bill is a combination rare in the field of wildlife conservation. Like many field biologists, he is highly educated and experienced, but he is also a scrapper and a doer. As he puts it, “Just because circumstances are dire for the golden frog and other amphibians, there is no reason to give up. In fact, it is time to raise the clarion call to action, because as long as there are frogs, there is hope.” With a smile, he adds, “Besides, frogs know how to be frogs. That’s their job. Ours is to figure a way to solve this mess so they can get back to their forests, streams, and wetlands.”

Until it’s safe for the golden frogs to return to the wild, the state-of-the-art facility will be the only safe haven for Panama’s golden frog. In fact, organizers imagined the facility being a model for other threatened species that might need to be temporarily or permanently removed from the wild to be saved.

The question now remains—when will it be safe for the frog to return to the wild? Or will it ever? With persistence and gained knowledge, perhaps the streams of Panama will ring with the hopeful call of male frogs again. Time will tell.