The Amphibian Avenger

Here's one I caught earlier

So I thought I was pretty good at catching frogs. I liked to think I was something of a master - the result of many years spent honing my skills. A sort of human heron, but bigger and without feathers. And obviously I don't eat them afterwards.

But it seems that I have been totally outclassed by Claudio and Andrew, who are in another league. These Darwin's frogs are super rare, super tiny and do a great impersonation of a leaf and yet they have both managed to catch several specimens whilst I am still empty handed. It's beginning to bug me. 

Like some sort of bad acid trip, I start seeing frogs everywhere. Beetles whose bums look like frogs...

...and even my frog catching colleagues are starting to look distinctly amphibiany...

Anyway after several days of pouncing victoriously on god knows how many leaves, I finally spot one. What makes me especially happy is the markings on his stomach are shaped like a letter L. He was destined to be Lucy's frog. It was meant to be.

 

 

As you can see from the photo I have now graduated to BLUE GLOVE status. This means that I am now a fully paid up member of the froq squad and officially allowed to touch the little webbed wonders. But weirdly, I don't really want to. Which is very, very unusual. But they are so precious (and also potentially pregnant) that I'm too nervous to fondle them for fear of squashing their delicate little bodies. Manhandling a bullfrog is one thing (a big brutish invasive species) but a tiny little pregnant Darwin's frog is another. Even with the glove.

The single blue glove by the way is not some rubbery homage to the late great Michael Jackson, but rather a bio-security measure. Each frog gets its own glove so we minimise the risk of cross-contamination should any of them carry infectious diseases like the dreaded fungus. 

As with all the frogs, we swab my specimen for Chytrid, measure and photograph him before setting him free in the exact same spot we found him. This is very important as we think these frogs have a very small range - we keep finding the same individuals in their same square foot of moss, day after day. We wonder if this could be a breeding season thing and they are guarding their eggs waiting for the right moment to eat them, but who knows. So little is known about this species that almost everything we observe about them was previously unknown. This is such an incredible thing to be a part of and I realise that compared with studying well-loved species like chimps or pandas, studying amphibians really is like going to the moon - every step is a first for mankind. 

 

And what a step...this may look like a double dog turd disaster but it's actually me and Andrew disinfecting our boots after an amazing day in the field. Only one thing could have made it more perfect...finding a pregnant male.

Loitering by the gents looking for a pregnant frog

At the press conference Rhinoderma claims he's innocent...

It's a 4 hour drive from the tin pot airport in Patagonia to the forests that Darwin's frog calls home. They are like something out of a fairy tale - a surreal mixture of dense bamboo, wild fuschia trees, giant gunnera plants (an oversized relative of the rhubarb with leaves big enough to live under) and lofty trees dripping in moss, all surrounded by snowcapped peaks. A thick mist hangs in the air. It's all very Lord of the Rings. 

 

So we're looking for a 3cm, perfectly camouflaged frog in this vast national park. The words needle and haystack spring to mind but Claudio is confident we're going to succeed. Last year he combed southern Chile for Rhinoderma, checking pristine wilderness locations that were all thought to have healthy populations. He found nothing for a month and was on the verge of despair when he set up camp in this enchanted forest. Nature called and he finally stumbled upon his first specimen by the campsite toilet. It seems Darwin's frog is the George Michael of the amphibian world and likes nothing better than hanging out by the gents. So it's our job to do the same for the next 3 days - which could take some explaining if we get busted. 

So we head straight for the loos and within 5 minutes Andrew has spotted his first Darwin's frog. A juvenile no more than 1cm long. 

The discovery of baby froglets makes us all even more excited about the possibility that we might find a pregnant male - the holy grail of the herp world. Others follow - impressive adult specimens including one that looks like it might have eggs in its throat...it's all very exciting.

 

The Avenger lands in Chile

Chilean Frog Squad 

Compared with its South American neighbours, Chile doesn't have a dizzying array of amphibians (a mere fifty species) but the ones that it does have are almost all totally unique. That's because Chile is essentially a long thin island isolated by desert to the north, glaciers to the south, sea to the east and the Andes to the west. So despite being part of a vast frog filled continent, Chile's amphibians have evolved in a bubble, which makes them especially odd and even more vulnerable to extinction. All in all, a great place to start my amphibian odyssey.

I'm here to look for the super freaky and super rare Rhinoderma darwinii or Darwin's frog, first discovered by the big beard himself in 1835 on his epic Beagle trip.  

What makes this frog so special is its extraordinary reproductive strategy. Daddy Darwin's frogs do something that Will Young can only dream of - they get pregnant. Unlike Mr Young they don't do it to boost flagging record sales but instead its a means for the species to eschew conventional pond-based metamorphosis in favour of something altogether more sci-fi. 

After mating, the male guards the fertilised eggs until they are close to hatching and then he gobbles them up. Six weeks later, like a scene out of Alien, he barfs up baby frogs, making this little frog one of the only species of animal in which the male gives birth (the others all being fish from the seahorse family).

 

Australia's Platypus frog burbs up babies - something no-one will ever see again...

As such, Darwin's frog is of great scientific significance as it is now the last of the mouth or gastric brooding frogs left on the planet. Chile's Northern Darwin's frog hasn't been seen or heard for nearly 30 years and Australia's two species of gastric brooding frogs were wiped out in the 1980's, most probably by Chytrid.

The unique biology of these extinct species could have held clues for the cure to any number of gastric illnesses from stomach ulcers to cancer. Now just the Southern Darwin's frog is left and their numbers are in decline.

So I'm joining Dr Andrew Cunningham (one of the group of scientists who first fingered Chytrid as the deadly fungus killing off amphibians, he is basically a world expert on Chytrid) and his PhD student Claudio Soto-Azat (who is studying and conserving Darwin's frogs here in Chile) on an expedition to Chilean Patagonia to find out if the critically endangered Darwin's frog has been infected by the evil fungus.