Dante's Heart
The Extinction of Frogs: A Tale of Heroes
Daniel Fusch
We are in the middle of something beautiful but terribly sad. Perhaps some of
you remember reading or watching this in the news. Perhaps some of you
remember the hotel in Panama that had several floors converted into a
conservatory for golden frogs and other species of amphibians, two summers
ago. Biologists racing against time and against a lethal fungus that has been
leaping from creek to creek, pond to pond across Central America, collected
as many frogs as they could out of the trees and brought them to hotel rooms,
bathing them daily in antifungal treatments, sending as many volunteers as they
could out into the wood to collect termites in their thousands to feed the captive
frogs, and carefully treating the many poisonous species with gloved hands. The
Washington Post reported the story of Edgardo Griffith, a local biologist in
Panama who found the first dead frog in that part of the world, spread out in a
stream with peeling skin:
He scooped it up, went home and cried..."There's nothing you can do," Griffith
remembered telling his girlfriend. (1)
And the Deseret News offered this quote from Kevin Zippel, the amphibian
program officer for the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group, which has
worked to build conservatories at zoos in Central America, capturing frogs in
artificial homes because they can no longer survive in the wild:
This is the greatest extinction crisis that humans have ever seen...Amphibians
are in big trouble, more than any other group on the planet. (2)
We do not know the source of the fungus, or how it spreads (by traveling bird? by
some other creature?), or where it will go next. Conservationists are investigating
on several continents. What we do know is that last year we witnessed the
extinction of more than a hundred species of wild frogs in many parts of Central
America. Perhaps for some this is a trivial thing, especially under the weight of
horrors in Darfur and Iraq. But for the people of Panama it is a sorrow: for them
the golden frog is lucky; lottery tickets carry its image. Remember the beauty of
these frogs, the vibrant splashes of venomous color, unique in the world. Think,
too, of the singing of the frogs at night. Now in Panama and other places, the
nights are silent. People listen in the dark and hear nothing.
And there is another toll: many other reptiles in that part of the world rely on the
frogs for food. These reptiles are vanishing, as well. How far up the chain will
the silence go?
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Daniel Fusch
We are in the middle of something beautiful but terribly sad. Perhaps some of
you remember reading or watching this in the news. Perhaps some of you
remember the hotel in Panama that had several floors converted into a
conservatory for golden frogs and other species of amphibians, two summers
ago. Biologists racing against time and against a lethal fungus that has been
leaping from creek to creek, pond to pond across Central America, collected
as many frogs as they could out of the trees and brought them to hotel rooms,
bathing them daily in antifungal treatments, sending as many volunteers as they
could out into the wood to collect termites in their thousands to feed the captive
frogs, and carefully treating the many poisonous species with gloved hands. The
Washington Post reported the story of Edgardo Griffith, a local biologist in
Panama who found the first dead frog in that part of the world, spread out in a
stream with peeling skin:
He scooped it up, went home and cried..."There's nothing you can do," Griffith
remembered telling his girlfriend. (1)
And the Deseret News offered this quote from Kevin Zippel, the amphibian
program officer for the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group, which has
worked to build conservatories at zoos in Central America, capturing frogs in
artificial homes because they can no longer survive in the wild:
This is the greatest extinction crisis that humans have ever seen...Amphibians
are in big trouble, more than any other group on the planet. (2)
We do not know the source of the fungus, or how it spreads (by traveling bird? by
some other creature?), or where it will go next. Conservationists are investigating
on several continents. What we do know is that last year we witnessed the
extinction of more than a hundred species of wild frogs in many parts of Central
America. Perhaps for some this is a trivial thing, especially under the weight of
horrors in Darfur and Iraq. But for the people of Panama it is a sorrow: for them
the golden frog is lucky; lottery tickets carry its image. Remember the beauty of
these frogs, the vibrant splashes of venomous color, unique in the world. Think,
too, of the singing of the frogs at night. Now in Panama and other places, the
nights are silent. People listen in the dark and hear nothing.
And there is another toll: many other reptiles in that part of the world rely on the
frogs for food. These reptiles are vanishing, as well. How far up the chain will
the silence go?
next page
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