Means pauses for
a moment by Double
Drop Falls before leav-
ing the rainforest he’s
studied for 35 years.
The 2021 expedition
was his 33rd and final
scientific mission to
the Upper Paikwa, yet
much remains to be
discovered. Only about
half of the region’s frog
species have been
scientifically identified,
Means says. “It’s up to
someone else to pick
up where I’ve left off.”make the trek out. The only option was to call in
an emergency helicopter rescue.
The canopy was so thick that our satellite
phone didn’t work, but after several hours we
finally managed to text our coordinates to our
outfitter back in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown.
The next day a helicopter descended into the
small opening at the base of Double Drop Falls.
After a round of hugs, Bruce headed for the chop-
per, only to trip and fall one last time. As the heli-
copter climbed out over the jungle, I saw Bruce
in the passenger seat looking out the window.
I knew he could see Wei assipu and Roraima to
the south and west, rising from the cloud forest,
their waterfalls casting rainbows and diamonds
into the rivers far below. Ahead, the veiny pathT
WO DAYS LATER we’d run out
of supplies and were forced to head
down the mountain. Bruce had relo-
cated to a new spot, “Sloth Camp,” a
day’s hike above Double Drop Falls.
We found him sitting at a workbench
sketching a rubbery brown frog, its
body laid out on a metal tray next to his note-
book. His field lab was covered with several glass
jars of formaldehyde, filled with frogs, lizards,
and snakes. He lit up when he saw us, but his eyes
were puffy and red rimmed. His safari shirt was
ripped and splotched with mud. As he gripped the
edge of the table and tried to stand, he grimaced,
and I realized that he was in a great deal of pain.
“I’m so sorry we didn’t find the Stefania,” Fuco
said, handing Bruce a baggie that contained the
centipede and cricket.
“It’s OK,” said Bruce. “The fact that you didn’t
find any frogs up there is actually a scientific
result in its own right.” I could see that a devilish
grin was spreading across his face. He led us over
to the workbench, where he picked up the brown
frog and held it up for us to see. A small white
tag with some numbers was attached to its foot.
“Is that ... ?” I said, recognizing it from the
sketch of the Stefania that Bruce had sent us.
“I won’t know for sure until I’ve been able to
do the DNA analysis,” Bruce said, “but I’m about
95 percent sure that this is a new species of Ste-
fania.” He explained that it was different from
the one he’d seen all those years ago on top of
Weiassipu—the one Fuco, Alex, and I had just
been killing ourselves to find—but it was almost
definitely another missing link in the Stefania
evolutionary tree that he and Philippe Kok had
been working on for years.
Bruce put the frog back down and started pull-
ing out other specimens to show us. “It’s funny
how it worked out,” he said. “Me not going up
the wall turned out to be a blessing in disguise,
because it gave me time to thoroughly explore
this cloud forest, which no scientists have ever
investigated before.”
In all, Bruce was confident he’d found six spe-
cies new to science, including a nonvenomous
colubrid snake and a spectacled lizard, which
had a transparent lower eyelid that allowed it
to see when its eyes were closed.
That evening, over a dinner of watery noodles,
we discussed what had long been the elephant in
the room. Bruce’s condition had deteriorated to
the point that there was simply no way he could
70 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC