Panama Hotel Is Imperiled Frogs' Lifeboat

Each night, the collectors came back to the quarantine zone of the Campestre, where a "stud book" is kept to track breeding. The hotel had become the frogs' own Hotel California, a place where they could check in but could never check out. The volunteers found glass frogs with skin so translucent that their organs are always on full display. They picked up frogs that look like rocks and eat freshwater crabs, aggressive tree frogs and shy, nocturnal toads.

But the golden frogs are the stars. Panamanians have loved them for centuries. Ancient, indigenous peoples are said to have come each year to El Valle to collect the frogs, which were considered symbols of prosperity and virility.

Indeed, the golden frogs, especially the males, are known for their taste for the good life, perhaps making their transition to VIP status at the Campestre predictable. The males happily hop on the backs of the much larger females, who carry them around for as long as 80 days searching for just the right spot to breed. All the while, the males gently set the mood by pressing the females' chests with callus-like "nuptial pads" on their thumbs.

The biologists who collected the frogs were an inspired group dedicated to what they saw as a desperate mission. But that's not what the locals thought. The locals thought they were poachers and that their fungus was a hoax. A newspaper even ran an editorial cartoon that showed a man fleeing the country with a suitcase that had frog legs sticking out the ends.

"People in El Valle were telling me, 'You have to leave,' " Griffith said.

Adrian Benedetti, the charismatic young director of the Summit Zoo outside Panama City and a supporter of the frog rescue project, stepped in for damage control.

"Zoos know how to talk to the public. Sometimes biologists don't," Benedetti said.

With the public quelled, the frog rescue project turned to its next phase: building a state-of-the-art center at a private zoo in El Valle to house the delicate frogs. The nearly completed center will be the ecological equivalent of a nuclear fallout shelter, a refuge from a toxic environment and an uncertain future.

The center, its organizers hope, could be a template for other threatened species that might need to be temporarily or permanently removed from the wild to be saved. Scientists are now calculating exactly how many frogs of each species will be needed to prevent genetic mutations. They're also developing techniques for managing in-house breeding.

But even such a well-planned endeavor isn't without vexing questions.

"There's this moral dilemma," Benedetti said. "Is this evolution? Should we let it run its course? If we do this for frogs, then do we do it some other time for the snakes?"

The trickiest question, perhaps, is about the future. Biologists know that chytrid fungus kills all amphibians it touches, but they aren't sure how long it sticks around.

"We're all kind of scratching our heads for the answer about what is going to happen next," said Pete Riger of the Houston Zoo, which is the driving force behind the El Valle conservation center project.

Could it be, Riger and others have wondered, that the frogs they are saving in Panama might be the last of their kind? And might those frogs -- those jumping, squirmy delights -- never see the outside world again?