From the Brink of Extinction, Some Frogs Defy the Odds

The Crux
By Robin Moore
Nov 4, 2014 8:00 PMNov 19, 2019 11:49 PM
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The Variable Harlequin Frog is just one of the so-called Lazarus frogs rediscovered in recent years. In 2003, two young biology students called Justin Yeager and Mark Pepper were in Costa Rica studying poison dart frogs when their guide presented them with a pair of beautiful orange-yellow and black frogs. They were left speechless, because in front of them was a species that was no longer meant to exist. The Variable Harlequin Frog, Atelopus varius, had disappeared from cool streams across Costa Rica and Panama in the early 1990s, leaving not even a corpse to mark its existence. Its vanishing, alongside myriad other frogs including the famed golden toad, was later attributed to the wave-like spread of a pandemic pathogen – a fungus responsible for the greatest disease-driven loss of biodiversity in our times – against a backdrop of a changing climate and dwindling and damaged habitats. In the wake of such carnage, was the variable harlequin frog a lone survivor? Could it increase our understanding of the current mass extinction and help us stem the hemorrhaging of life from our planet? The harlequin frog, it would turn out, was not alone. Five years after its rediscovery herpetologist Robert Puschendorf was crashing through the dry forests of north Australia when he found a small population of Armored Mist Frog, Litoria lorica, living with the very same chytrid fungus that was believed to have wiped it out 17 years previously. The following year in New South Wales the Yellow-spotted Bell Frog, Litoria castanea, hopped back to life after 30 years without trace. Back in the Americas, Lazarus frogs were reappearing in Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Costa Rica, years and even decades after they were thought to have been wiped out.

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