National Treasure:
An invaluable toad
AT FIRST GLANCE, frog number 307457, also known as “the Old Man,” looks no different from the 30-odd Panamanian golden frogs he shares a basement room with at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. His personality, though, is more muted. Although he has an entire enclosure to himself, he often prefers to hide among the leaves rather than bask under the warm lights like the others.
But the Old Man’s understated demeanor belies his outsized importance. He is not just any Panamanian golden frog, which, despite the name, is technically a type of toad. He’s a member of what might be called his species’ Greatest Generation, the first to battle the most formidable of all existential threats, extinction. Scientists captured his parents in 2003 in the verdant cloud forests of El Valle de Antón and Cerro Campana—the only places where Panamanian golden frogs existed in the wild—after it had become clear the beloved species was doomed.
WE WANT TO CONTINUE TO PASS ALONG THESE VERY VALUABLE GENES.
In Panama, everyone knows about the golden frog, the national animal, celebrated in murals, lottery tickets and T-shirts. There’s even Panamanian Golden Frog Day. The creature is a natural marvel, not least for its defensive traits: The neon-yellow skin of just one frog contains enough toxin to kill 1,200 mice. Unlike many other amphibians, which prefer the cover of darkness, this toad, endowed with a lethal defense against predators and an unmistakable coloration to advertise it, is most active during the day. Panamanians have long seen the golden frog as a symbol of the nation’s biodiversity and natural heritage, making its abrupt disappearance all the more poignant.
In the 1990s, herpetologists around the world began warning of unexplained deaths and sudden disappearances of various amphibians. In 1999, researchers pinpointed the pathogen behind the plague: a deadly amphibian chytrid fungus. Correctly fearing the malady it caused would reach pandemic proportions, the nonprofit Maryland Zoo, in Baltimore, worked with Panamanian and