Weird, cosmic-eyed frog rediscovered in far-off cloud forest

Teresa Camacho Badani’s boots brimmed with water after slogging through flowing streams in Bolivia’s mountainous cloud forest. It had been a taxing day searching for an elusive frog that potentially still inhabited the gushing streams here — though the species hadn’t been spotted in 10 years. She was exhausted.

But she stepped into one last stream, and found a wild-eyed, orange-bellied Sehuencas water frog. She screamed.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Badani, the chief of herpetology at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny, said over the phone from her office in Bolivia.

At a time when conservation news is repeatedly dour and current extinction numbers are between 100 to 1,000 times that of the natural, expected rate, the discovery of this female frog (along with four others) provides a dose of cautious optimism.

The recently found water frog, “Juliet,” held by Teresa Camacho Badani.

No one knows how many of these rare frogs still exist in the wild, said Badani. But it’s undoubtedly few. So conservationists at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny will now attempt to expand the water frogs’ population in captivity — now that they have females.

For 10 years, the museum kept watch over a lone male Sehuencas water frog, which they nicknamed Romeo. And after raising funds to support intrepid expeditions into the remote forest (Badani and her team spent three hours pushing their car out of a muddy river), Badani’s four-person team, comprised of veterinarians and biologists, ventured into the wilderness. 

Once the water frogs are healthy and habituated, the captive breeding program will begin. They now have three males and three females.

But the species is by no means saved. Like many critters globally, the Sehuencas water frog is victim of a depleted habitat. Big swaths of its already-limited ecological niche are being cleared away, largely for plantations and agriculture. These agricultural ventures aren’t always necessarily bad — people in remote regions need to find ways to support themselves. But it’s happening in Sehuencas’ habitat.

The cloud forest in Bolivia.

Many of the images of the frogs’ forest home are burgeoning with vibrant green forest. But “the pictures are deceiving,” said Badani. This pristine wilderness is vanishing. 

And it’s not just the Sehuencas water frog that’s suffering. Before finding their first frog at the day’s end, the conservationists hadn’t even spotted another frog species. 

“It was empty,” said Badani. 

But now, they have an improved hope to raise a population of these depleted frogs. The next step — if the captive breeding proves successful — is finding protected habitat for the frogs to survive.

It’s an ambitious effort to preserve the world’s color and biodiversity, up in the cloud forests where the orange-bellied water frogs roam the streams, and hop through waterfalls.