I understood why a kids’ magazine had opted to publish photos of live
frogs rather than dead ones. I also understood the impulse to play up the
Beatrix Potter–like charms of amphibians ordering room service. Still, it
seemed to me, as a journalist, that the magazine had buried the lede. Any
event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a
backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as
exceedingly rare. The notion that a sixth such event would be taking place
right now, more or less in front of our eyes, struck me as, to use the
technical term, mind-boggling. Surely this story, too—the bigger, darker,
far more consequential one—deserved telling. If Wake and Vredenburg
were correct, then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of
the rarest events in life’s history, we are also causing it. “One weedy
species,” the pair observed, “has unwittingly achieved the ability to
directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this
planet.” A few days after I read Wake and Vredenburg’s article, I booked a
ticket to Panama.
* * *
THE El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center, or EVACC (pronounced