Panama Travel Journal - Day 6

Through a communication glitch, we will jump over Day 5 and continue Bob’s blog entries with Day 6. We’ll catch up with Day 5 later this week...
Day 6 November 18, 2009 –

7:00 pm -Today the group split into two. Della, Mark, Jamie, Kevin, Jorge and Roberto stayed in camp to process frogs. That basically involves opening the plastic collection bags, letting in new air, sexing the frogs and rechecking identification, recording the data written on the bags over to paper field notes, swabbing for chytrid and feeding them. A big job as we now have around 50 frogs. Also, a very important job as the swabbing of frogs for chytrid will tell us if it is in this Panamanian park. If so, we are in big trouble as die-off happens over a period of months, not years. You will be able to see video of this as I post them in a few days.

Edgardo, Matt and I were to make a 45-minute hike to another stream to search for a couple of other species. Not something any of us or the group that stayed behind was looking forward to, since tomorrow we would make the eight hour hike out. This may have been the most important seven hours of the trip for me. That may seem an odd statement given the importance of the finds in the last day or so.

For example, last night we found a big frog called gastrotheca, a frog that is huge by comparison to limosus. It makes a popping sound you can hear late into the night. Though very vocal, you hear them, but never find them. Imagine someone holding a ping pong ball and hitting it once in a room that echoes. It reminds me of a scene from the movie “Hunt for Red October” where Sean Connery is checking sonar on another submarine and he says, “Give me one ping…One ping only please” in a Russian accent. It is also interesting in the fact that it is a marsupial frog and stores its young in a pouch on its back.

More remarkably, we found an ecnonomiohyla milliaria. A large species that can glide! The world’s expert on frogs in Panama has only seen three alive in his 30 years of experience and yet, there it was just sitting on a leaf at waist height.

Why then was today’s seven hours so important? Because we did not find frogs. In a pristine stream 45 minutes farther into the jungle, three qualified people spent seven hours searching, only to find two frogs. Yesterday, during the same timeframe in the stream near the house, we found 13. It flat out scared me. “Were we too late?” kept ringing in my head.

Now being a reasonable but passionate person it is easy to get carried away when you care about something. The reasonable part of me thinks that that doesn’t mean anything. The passionate part does not care if chytrid is here. For the first time, I can imagine the day when researchers will sit in this stream only to find the frogs gone for real. Only the chytrid swabs the other group is doing right now will tell us which part of me is right. I know I have said this to many people in the past, but it is not IF they disappear, but WHEN. Today in my mind for seven hours I lived that nightmare, because in my mind, they were already gone.

The trip to Panama will start normally for future researchers, as ours did. Soon they will realize, as we did, that they have been searching for hours with no success. Then they will take note that there are no tad poles in the water. Then they will take water samples, and they will wait, as we do now, for the results of the chytrid swabs. This killer is unlike other more visible problems like deforestation. I can imagine how it will make you feel when they are gone. When you read on some blog, or in National Geographic, or hear on the news, or see pictures of these wonderful species, that are now gone. When you then stop to think about it and realize what has occurred, you will be sad, as I am sad.

I started these blog entries with the concept that the general public has busy lives and sometimes they don’t make room for the wonders of nature. In their minds they want to believe things will be OK and that other people are out there saving the nameless creatures they do not have time on most days to consider.

Well, I can tell you we are out here and we are doing something and we need your help. The people doing this work need support, that is plain and simple. The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, for example, is not tax supported in any way. Of the 215 accredited zoos in North America, less than ten run like we do.

We are supporting this trip with dollars raised through donors and dollars earned at the admissions gate and through memberships; and food purchases, giraffe crackers and more. If the community had not supported us in the last few years, we would not have the cash to be here and not have the pod to move the frogs to awaiting their their wild return. Basically, we need just a few things from you and about a billion other people. We need you to be thoughtful as you interact with the world. This will be harder than it sounds, simpler than you think, and more far reaching than you can imagine. Try not to take or use more than you need and come to the Zoo and support our work or the work of others in any manner that you can. Buy a giraffe cracker at the very least, it all adds up.

Here is the sum of the situation. Right now we can find over 100 frogs in three days. What happens when we only find two a day? I heard the chair of the AZA board, speaking to a group of 1200 conservationist, say, “ we need to be faster, more nimble and quicker in our actions to save wildlife and preserve our way of life” That is what we need now. Fast, quick, nimble….
-Bob Chastain