Silence.
That’s what I remember most from the first time I saw a frog infected with chytrid.
In what feels like a lifetime ago, I was a biology student in Guatemala. One evening in the cloud forests of Baja Verapaz (ca. 2011), a group of us were herping: walking along a stream, flashlights in hand, scanning mossy tree trunks and leaves looking for salamanders, frogs, and snakes.
At first, it felt like any other field night. Slow, quiet, almost meditative.
– “Guys, come see this,” someone yelled over the sound of the stream.
On a moss-covered tree trunk sat a frog that didn’t quite look like a frog anymore. Almost entirely black, crouched, barely reactive…
– “What species is this?” someone asked.
Our professor looked closer. Because of a few key characteristics that he knew well, he said something like:
– “It’s another Plectrohyla…”
We looked at each other, confused. That did not look like a Plectrohyla.
– “…it’s infected.”
Silence.
It was as if someone had suddenly turned the volume down on the forest. The collective sadness among us was palpable.
We all knew about chytrid fungus. We had read the papers. We were taking a herpetology class. But seeing it—seeing a frog in front of you dying from it, unrecognizable, in a patch of forest that looked healthy—made the reality hit different.
I didn’t know it then, but the place where we stood that night was also one of the places where, a couple of decades earlier, herpetologists like Joe Mendelson had begun noticing amphibian declines.
As an undergrad, his name was already familiar to me. When preparing for field trips, we would go through the literature or biological collections to learn the species names and characteristics. In doing that, you quickly learn that scientific names sometimes carry a small piece of history with them: besides the “Genus epithet” format (e.g. Homo sapiens), the name of the scientist who first described the species is often included. So I kept encountering the same surnames: Campbell, Wake, Mendelson. “Incilius campbelli (Mendelson, 1994).”
What I never really thought about at the time was how this crisis had even been identified. For me, “this was always there”. For scientists in the 80s and 90s, this was a whole detective story. A long period when nobody even knew there was a disease to worry about, but only that something strange was happening with frogs around the world.
It’s hard to imagine. Needless to say, I was very excited to e-meet Joe, and even more excited that we can now share this story with you through the recently-launched Amphibian Rescue podcast—a podcast I’m producing for Amphibian Ark.
Joe was among the early responders to the amphibian extinction crisis, and in Episode 1 of the Amphibian Ark podcast, he walks us through this sad but important piece of our natural history.
Frogs are going silent around the world
Amphibians—frogs, salamanders, caecilians—are among the most threatened groups of animals on Earth, yet their stories are rarely told outside the amphibian community. They still face plenty misconceptions, and they remain the most underfunded of the most threatened vertebrates.
With this podcast, we want to bring you closer to the stories and the people who for years (some even for decades!) have been rescuing amphibians from extinction. The more I learned about what Amphibian Ark has achieved in its first 20 years, the more I kept thinking: everybody should know this. There’s so much doom and gloom around wildlife conservation sometimes, but there are also many stories of success and hope out there. They’re often known within their communities, but I’m sure many more people could find motivation in them too (I know I have!).
Because here’s the thing: we actually know what to do and how to do it—preventing amphibian extinctions is possible. Conservationists have already saved species from the brink of extinction through ex situ conservation efforts. But more species still need us. And while there is a lot of work ahead, these efforts have already prevented the loss of species forever. And, actually, many are already being released back into their natural habitats! (We’ll tell you more about them in this podcast)
And if you’re wondering what ex situ conservation even means, well, that’s exactly what the first three episodes are for 😉.
The people working to protect amphibians have such grit, passion, and stories that are hard not to find inspiring. Join me in learning more about them! Episodes will come out monthly, but we didn’t want you to wait long for more stories, so today we launched with three episodes at once!
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