was a male toad. Within a radius of 5 m, at least 200
males gathered in small pools. There were fewer fe-
males, and where pairs were in amplexus, single males
struggled to separate them. Late that evening, we re-
turned to this woodland in a driving rain. Few toads
were active, yet we saw 10—12 amplectant pairs in the
pools. One female had laid 220 relatively large eggs
in two strings, and Scott collected a series to raise in
the laboratory. The uniformly dark brown tadpoles
began to transform on 21 June. The toadlets were
brown with pale bluish white spots above and were
mottled with black and the same pale color under-
neath. I coined the scientific name Bufo periglenes in
reference to the extraordinary coloration of the adults
(Savage 1966). "Periglenes" means bright in Greek.
Thus a literal translation is "bright toad."MQNTEVERDE SALAMANDERS/GOLDEN TOADS, AND
THE EMERGENCE OF THE GLOBAL AMPHIBIAN CRISIS
J.Alan Poundshe case of Monteverde has played a key role
in bringing the plight of amphibians to the
world's attention (Phillips 1994). In Novem-
ber 1988, David Wake, a professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, visited Monteverde to study
salamanders. He was especially interested in the
Monteverde Salamander, a brown species of Boli-
toglossa with rusty blotches (Fig. 5.4). To Wake's sur-
prise, he and his assistants were unable to find a single
salamander. Only a year before in precisely the same
places he had found several dozen individuals rep-
resenting four species. "Hard to understand," he wrote
in his field notes.
Wake's concern led him to take steps that would
bring amphibian declines to the attention of scientists
and the popular press. In September 1989, he attended
the First World Congress of Herpetology in Canter-
bury, England. There he learned from Martha Crump
that Golden Toads, for the second year in a row, had
not gathered at their traditional breeding pools in the
Monteverde Preserve. For some time, Wake had been
hearing casual reports from colleagues who were
having trouble finding amphibians in various places
around the world. It was at Canterbury, however, that
the reports became disturbingly frequent. A few weeks
later, Wake visited the National Academy of Sciences
headquarters in Washington, B.C., for a meeting of the
National Research Council's Board of Biology. Talk-
ing with colleagues there, he mentioned the stories
from Canterbury. He spoke of Monteverde's missing
salamanders and Golden Toads. Harold Morowitz, a
biophysicist at George Mason University, and Oscar
Zaborsky, then administrator for the Board of Biology,
found the declines especially alarming. They and Wake
organized a meeting of scientists to discuss the prob-
lem. Morowitz and Zaborsky took charge of raising
money to finance the conference; Wake focused on
recruiting participants.
It soon became apparent that the patterns that
seemed so unusual to Wake were open to more than
one interpretation. Amphibian populations naturally
undergo strong fluctuations, and the more extreme
cases could be mistaken for alarming declines (see
Introduction to this chapter and Sec. 5.7). At a lun-
cheon attended by representatives of conservation
groups, Morowitz began to tell the story of the Golden
Toad's disappearance. One of the attendees, who had
worked in Costa Rica, cut him off, insisting there
was no evidence that the Golden Toad had declined.
Morowitz was stunned and almost derailed by this
response, but with Wake's encouragement he contin-
ued his efforts as a lobbyist for frogs. As a scientist,
Wake recognized that skepticism is healthy, because
it forces researchers to adhere to high standards of
scientific proof. As a conservationist, however, he felt
he could not wait years before expressing his concern.
The efforts of Morowitz and Zaborsky paid off.
Funding materialized and the meeting took place. In
February 1990, with support from the Smithsonian
Institution, Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, and the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences, 40 scientists gathered at
Irvine, California. Thirteen biologists told of declines
and disappearances of amphibian populations in
many widely scattered parts of the world (Wake and
Morowitz 1991). Most of the participants were con-
vinced that the reports were too many and too wide-
spread to be sheer coincidence. Soon after the meet-
ing, however, there were "cautionary tales" about
drawing conclusions from "anecdotal observations"
(Pechmann et al. 1991), and a heated controversy
began (Blaustein 1994, Pechmann and Wilbur 1994,
Pounds etal. 1997; see Sec. 5.1.1).
Some of those convinced of the reality of the prob-
lem took action. The Species Survival Commission of
the World Conservation Union (IUCN) formed the
Task Force on Declining Amphibian Populations172 Amphibians and Reptiles