Copyright Resilience
Rob Dietz 00:01 Hi. I'm Rob Dietz. Jason Bradford 00:02 I'm Jason Bradford Asher Miller 00:04 And I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town. Rob Dietz 00:06 In today's episode, Jason, our resident biology guru here in Crazy Town interviews conservationist brothers Kyle and Trevor Ritland, who wrote the new book, "The Golden Toad: An ecological mystery and the search for a lost species." These three eco-explorers connect over wondrous habitats and critters in Costa Rica's cloud forest and swap stories that cover Lazarus species, global pandemics, self-taught naturalists, birding, and even pregnancy tests. Spliced into the nostalgia and stories are reflections on how to cope in a world where biodiversity is declining, and how to regain the connections that modernity has severed between humanity and wild nature. Here's Jason, Kyle, and Trevor. Jason Bradford 00:56 Monte Verde, cloud forests, climate, biodiversity, an adventure tale. Kyle and Trevor Ritland, you're a different generation than I am, but we have a lot in common, historically. Trevor Ritland 01:09 Thanks for having us, and we're happy to join you and talk about toads. It's something we love doing. Jason Bradford 01:13 How about this? I'd like you to guys to talk about a particular character in your book and your travels. Eladio Cruz, tell us who this guy is. Introduce the listener, who's Eladio Cruz? Trevor Ritland 01:26 Well, you've hit on what I think, kind of the book orbits around, and he's really the person that made me when I was, you know, a younger guy in Monteverde, kind of roaming around and doing my thing, realize, like, there's a story here and it needs to be told and it hasn't been told before. So Eladio Cruz's story is he's a local guy, actually, from the San Luis Valley, just down the hill from Monteverde, Costa Rica, whose father, when he was a kid, took him up and over the Continental Divide into the Penas Blancas Valley in the kind of wild west homesteading days of this region in Costa Rica. And he is one of the people who had a relationship with this golden toad, this bright orange toad species that was known only to this ridge line above Monteverde, the same ridge line that he and his dad crossed to get into the Penas Blancas Valley when he was a little kid, and when Eladio was a little bit older, he was hired by, actually, a Quaker settler from the United States who was developing a dairy farm in Monteverde to clear land up on this ridge line, named Wolf Gwindon. And Wolf Gwindon really quickly just kind of discovered these toads, and Eladio was there with him when he was, you know, clearing pasture and they both sort of fell in love with this species. And it led to, in the long term, Wolf and Eladio working to, rather than start to cut down all this forest for pasture land, work toward preserving that forest with a local visiting biologist named George Powell. And that was a story that I'd kind of heard when I was visiting Monteverde of he's this self taught naturalist who, you know didn't get a degree in biology from the University of Costa Rica, but knows everything about this local ecosystem, and it was his story of seeing golden toads, this unique, endemic species two years after they were largely believed to have disappeared entirely, gone extinct. That made my brother, Kyle and I start to ask questions. And we learned that Eladio had never been back to this place where he had seen golden toads years after the decline. And we said, well, we have to go back there with them. And that's kind of what kicked off what has led to this book. Jason Bradford 04:02 Yeah, and you touched upon so many elements of this, and we're going to sort of draw them out over time because Monteverde is a really fascinating place. Because all these different characters, it's like there's this convergence of different cultures and characters that have come together that create this kind of a unique place in the world. Unique because of the combination, I would say the forest itself, I've been to cloud forests around the world, and so if you just plop me in, I may not know where I am exactly like. After a while I can maybe tell you what continent I'm on, but they have this certain aspect to them which is kind of similar. This mossiness, right? The stunted trees, if you get into the ridge lines where there's a lot of wind. And that's where these toads were on this like elfin forest stunted by the wind. And it's often this juxtaposition between sort of a drier side, a wetter side, and the movement of these air masses creating these strong winds, right? Tell me a little bit about like the different elements that made Monteverde unique. You've got, okay, you talked about the local farmers. These are these Costa Rican farmers descendant from Spanish colonialists from a long time ago. You have biologists, you have Quakers, and now, I guess the fourth element might be tourists. Trevor Ritland 05:18 Yep, you know exactly. It's this sort of weird vegetable soup of all these different personalities and experiences and perspectives coming together in this town. So exactly what you said. You have the kind of the locals we would call them, you know. The farmers, the ranchers, the homesteaders who are descended from Costa Rican families, and then in the 1950s you had the arrival of the Quakers from like Alabama, United States, who were fleeing the Korean draft. And they brought this whole different perspective into this town. And they settled in these highland areas of Monteverde, kind of above, where most of the Costa Rican families had settled. And then you had the arrival of the biologists in like the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and the advent of really a deliberate conservation ethic in Monteverde. And it's really interesting, because that conservation ethic that the biologists brought in a lot of ways, blended with some natural instincts that were already there. One of the things that the Quakers did was set aside a patch of land high up on the mountain to protect their watershed, and say, you know, we're never cutting this. This is the watershed land. We're going to protect this. And so, when the biologists got there and started to realize that this is this treasure trove of biodiversity, not only compared to things that we have in United States, but compared to the tropics too, which is huge, they kind of had something to build off of there when they started to work with the local people, people like Wolf Gwindon and people like Eladio Cruz to set up Cloud Forest Preserves and preserve this forest ecosystem. And now you have kind of that fourth wave of the tourists who come to see quetzals and orchids and hummingbirds and all these other awesome things. And there's so much endemism and unique life and different life zones in Monteverde. And so it's really brought kind of this new generation there. And it's really cool to see the town adapt to that and approach this tourism economy from a sustainable perspective and say, "Okay, how can we make this last long term without losing the identity of the town?" Because it's a really unique kind of local culture too. Jason Bradford 07:40 Yeah, I'm really curious about how that's going. I was there in 1991. Trevor Ritland 07:45 Well, it's different than it was in '91. Jason Bradford 07:46 Yeah, I was there in '94 and '95. I was there in 2012 and my gosh, that span between the mid 90s and the mid 2010s was - the difference was shocking to me. And so then another 10 years has passed since your book, you guys - And Kyle, maybe you should get in and say -Okay you guys are gonna sound the same, maybe, to our listeners because you guys are twins.. Kyle Ritland 08:11 Yeah, it's going to be similar for sure. Jason Bradford 08:17 How did you divide up working on this. What were the different roles you played? Trevor Ritland 08:24 Yeah, so Trevor definitely had, you know, he is the one who kind of brought this story to the two of us. He was living in Monteverde and working for a study abroad group after college, and learned about this stuff. And, you know, Monteverde, Costa Rica had always had kind of a place in the back of both of our minds because our father had been there and done some work there and told us all these stories about it. And it was really kind of this, you know, in my mind, this paradise. Most beautiful place in the world, incredible place. A place I thought maybe I would never go. And then Trevor brought this story back of the golden toad and the possibility of its continued existence. And so all of those things that had been hypothetical and fantastical became real, you know. And we went to this place and actually saw what, for so long had been this idea of paradise. And that in and of itself, is a very interesting idea. And so the story of the golden toad was the story that Trevor always came to tell. And what really interested me the more I learned about it was all of the context that surrounded that. The amphibian decline that followed the disappearance of the golden toad and everything that's come after that. A lot of the amphibian disappearances that were starting to be noticed, along with the golden toad's disappearance, that was, you know, kind of the hook for me that that drew me into the story of the golden toad as well. So he and I have always worked together on all sorts of creative projects and this one was really an excellent one to do that because there were places where we could challenge each other when we came to questions of how and why, the golden toad disappeared. Trevor really kind of came with one perspective, I came with another, and like the scientists of the time period, we kind of relitigated that and really tried to get to the bottom of it by pushing each other and challenging and hopefully ended up presenting a balance of those different ideas in the book. Jason Bradford 10:25 Yeah, that's interesting. So when I was there in '91 I remember talking about this. You know, it disappeared, and no one had seen it for a couple of years. There were specimens at the Cloud Forest Reserve in Monteverde. There was a lot of talk about Alan Pounds and his records of climate. So we were talking about maybe with some warming trends, and maybe some hot years that the clouds were condensing at a higher elevation. So that was sort of the story that I had in my head. And boy, it didn't take but a few years later when suddenly we learned about this chytrid fungus and the groups of scientists all sort of, from around the world, converging on maybe this pandemic that was killing amphibians. Kyle Ritland 11:12 Yeah. It's such an interesting story the way that it unfolded. So when we talk about ongoing amphibian declines, when you talk about the amphibian crisis, 9 out of 10 times what we're talking about is the chytrid fungus. Which, you know, the full name is Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is the name of this fungal pathogen that causes a disease that we refer to as chytrid, chytridiomycosis. And when the golden toad disappeared right around that time there were several other amphibian species declining very rapidly, disappearing, at various points across the globe. And at first, various scientists studying these species thought that they were isolated incidents. It is something that happens. But when they started to come together, and this really took place formally at the first World Congress of Herpetology in 1989, scientists started to say there's a pattern here. There's something that we're seeing across the globe, not just these isolated incidents. And at first, various theories were thrown out, you know, everything from UV radiation, to acid rain, to some very concrete things that absolutely have had an effect, like habitat destruction, like climate. People suspected disease for many years, but nothing had been able to be proven because these species vanish so quickly that often their bodies were not there to be examined or tested. And so what you had were, in the end, three groups of scientists across the globe, one group operating in Australia, one group operating in Central America, and another group and operating in Washington DC really all kind of having these lucky breaks at the same time. Being in the right place at the right time to be able to witness an amphibian population in the midst of their decline. And they were able to test those species and they discovered, really simultaneously, we're talking within the same months of each other, this fungal pathogen. And it's really this great story. We were lucky to be able to talk to different folks from each group who share those contemporaneous discoveries and really were able to show there is an active agent. And Trevor and I looked at this kind of as a murder mystery. You know, what is the killer of the golden toad? And chytrid, this fungal pathogen really is the prime suspect. What's interesting, though, is that the golden toad disappeared so quickly that it's impossible to prove. Kyle Ritland 13:11 Exactly. We know that the serial killer of chytrid was operating in this area at this time, but do we have hard evidence that it killed the golden toad? No, not necessarily. And that's where the question of climate comes into play because that's an issue here as well. Jason Bradford 13:16 So there was one particular scientist that I found fascinating because she was this old scientist that had just been working with the taxonomy of this fungal group. And it's this idea that you have this lone person who no one is paying any attention to. Kyle Ritland 14:26 Yep. Jason Bradford 14:27 And is going about her business. And you can think about, who's paying her to do this? Like, how did she stumble upon this group of fungi? Like, the sequence of events that led to this right person being there, you realize that's that's kind of remarkable. And the fact that we don't have a lot of taxonomy work going on and what are we missing. It makes me think, like, what are we missing, right? So who was she? And tell me, like, how rare this may be. Kyle Ritland 14:55 So Joyce Longcore. Amazing person. I was lucky enough to talk to her in person. I'll never forget it. I mean, she's the definition of toiling and anonymity. She was working for years on, yeah, you really could not have gotten more obscure in terms of areas of study than these fungal offshoots called chytrids in the 1980s because at that point there was really no reason that the public or science in general would be all that interested in chytrids. They're this obscure evolutionary branch of fungi, and at that point they had not had any negative effect on amphibians or any other species. And I don't think that it's an exaggeration at all to say that if Joyce Longcore had not existed and had not been studying what she was when she was, it might have taken years to decades to understand what it was that was killing these frogs. She was the expert who just happened to be able to identify these things and be able to conduct the studies that they needed in order to really know what they were looking at. And it's something that we didn't have a chance to really go into in depth in the book. But in the years that followed, she spent many years traveling across the globe teaching scientists and conservationists how to test for chytrid in the wild so that they were able to identify the fungus in these populations and act before it was too late. And so her impact on the current state of amphibians in the world is monumental for sure. Jason Bradford 16:40 Yeah, well I'm a weird audience for this book because I'm a taxonomist who specialized in cloud forests. Kyle Ritland 16:47 You're the perfect audience for this book. Jason Bradford 16:51 I'm also weird because in some ways I'm the perfect because it's about nostalgia, right? Like I'm thinking back to my 20 year old self and going, oh my gosh, these characters, you know. I met the Gwindens. I hung out with people there, you know. Bill Haber was one of the guys I hung out with. And so there was a lot of that going on in my head, and I actually wanted more of that. And I can tell you guys are right into a general audience. And so I'm just jonesing for, like, say more about this scientific detail. Trevor Ritland 17:23 Oh hey, I can send you the first stuff out. Kyle Ritland 17:24 We can send you early drafts. Jason Bradford 17:28 You didn't write it for me, but I was fine because I had that to go for. You wrote it more for a general audience and that's great. I'm a low hanging fruit here. So I want to give people a little bit more about if they haven't encountered tropical toads and frogs. Because you know, there's some in the US and North America. Around here, we have a Pacific tree frog. It's the closest thing we can get to like looking like one of these. But honestly, the diversity of these frogs and toads in the tropics is quite different than what we're used to, and also the sounds they make. Again, I hear bullfrogs and other things calling, but it's nothing quite like the noise of one of these forests. And it could be from the lowlands up into the into the mountains as long as you're in the wet season and it's at night. So what do these look like, and what do these sound like, and how many species would there have been, maybe, in some of these rich forests in, say, Central and South America, before the chytrid kind of laid waste? Trevor Ritland 18:34 I mean, if you grew up in the United States, like Kyle and I grew up in South Carolina and so we would get, you know, tree frogs kind of clinging to the window pane at night. And that was our cool frog. That was the coolest thing ever. And then you go to the tropics and you realize that you ain't seen nothing yet, especially with toads. You know, when people think of toads, I think they think these kind of brown, blotchy, kind of ugly, warty things, and that's one of the reasons why the golden toad is so unique. And so I suppose I'll start with the golden toad. I mean, the golden toad, Incilius periglenes, is this bright orange or almost yellow. They have this kind of range of coloration in the males. They're small but they're bright. And if you have spent any time in the cloud forest, you know, it's like dark and dripping and muddy, kind of dim, and so these bright orange toads would just stand out like a bright red bract of a bromeliad, almost. And like the most color in that forest. And then the females, they're like dark black with like red and yellow or orange kind of blotches on them. So both the males and the females super unique, super interesting. And obviously what makes them even more interesting is that they're only found in this one little area. But then throughout Monteverde and the rest of Costa Rica, you have all these other awesome incredible frog species. I was just paging through my amphibian field guide with my daughter yesterday. You know, you have glass frogs where you can see straight through their stomachs to their organs. You have variable harlequin frogs that have these like pointy noses and marbled red, yellow, orange, kind of coloration patterns on them, very aposematic, almost like a monarch butterfly or a viceroy. You have like gliding tree frogs in the Osa Peninsula. My favorite is these bright green tree frogs with orange on their sides. They look like they have tiger stripes. There's this, I really was not -- I thought frogs were interesting when I was a little kid growing up the United States, and then I went to Costa Rica and I just fell in love with frogs. And in Monteverde, in particular when you were there, 1991, was right around when Alan Pounds was doing his amphibian surveys to see, after the golden toad had disappeared, what else had disappeared. And they had known that there were 50 species of frogs in Monteverde and at that time 25 of those species were missing. So like half of your frogs. But can you imagine living in a place that has 50 frog species out your back door? It's like, come on, that's the coolest thing ever. And it's the same with other with other animals, like huge diversity of birds and reptiles and mammals. But for me, it was always the frogs. And when they're that beautiful and eye catching and unique, it's hard not to fall in love with them. Jason Bradford 21:28 Yeah, and then noises. Trevor Ritland 21:30 Yeah. Well, and that's another thing. So, we would talk to the biologist who, you know, arrived in Monteverde in like the 70s or 80s and were there now. And I think Kyle heard this story also from a lot of his folks that he talked to more broadly who were observing amphibian declines. They were used to the night being this cacophony of frog songs, and you could hear all the different species and pick them out by their calls. And then you compare that to today where the night is just more silent because we've lost a lot of these frog species too. Jason Bradford 22:09 It's like Silent Spring but instead of for birds, it's for frogs. And it sort of went, if you weren't living in those areas, it just happened to the world. And it was, I mean, there were articles, there were big articles from major publications. But what amazes me is we had this, you know, catastrophe for this whole lineage of life, and kind of shrugged it off and went on. The world just kept doing what it was doing. And so there was a lot of sadness, I mean, a lot of grief that went into into this. Reading your book, it was hard to read just because I've been to these places and I'm thinking to myself, gosh, what has happened in the last 15-20 years since I've been there and what did I miss? Like I showed up to a lot of places after this had gone through. I was in places in South America that probably hadn't been hit yet, but by now what's gone on? That's astonishing to me. But the other thing that's interesting is there's this term called lazarus species. So you often see this in there's waves of die off, and then there's maybe the point 1% that survive. And how do they return? So so tell us a little more about like, you know, you've got genetic variation in populations. Some might be resistant. There might be recovery. What's the state of recovery of frogs? Well first, give us like what's the state of die off that happened, maybe. And then, what do we know about recovery Trevor Ritland 23:41 So Kyle can probably speak more to this. But so BD, chytrid fungus, that was responsible for the decline of frogs in the 80s and 90s. I think that the stats are it was responsible for the decline of over 500 amphibian species and the total extinction of almost 100. That's a lot. And even those that just declined, they may not be extinct but do they have the genetic diversity to return to stability? Hard to say. Kyle Ritland 24:13 And what's funny is, you know, it's so hard to know. And even the people who are on the ground measuring these things, nobody can put firm numbers to things. I mean, nobody can even tell us how many species of amphibians there are globally,or in Monteverde, or in the South Eastern US. And then when you start to ask, how many have we lost? It's so hard to pin it down. We know those general numbers. But what a couple of folks that I spoke to said, and I think about this a lot too, is there are probably species that were not even described by science that have disappeared due to chytrid and the collective effects that we'll just never know about now. Jason Bradford 24:54 Yeah, I'm sure. Kyle Ritland 24:55 At the other side of that coin, though, this is where I like to be more hopeful is a lot of those species that did decline due to all of the contributing factors of this time period, chytrid, habitat destruction, climate change, a small handful of them over the last few years that we thought were gone have started to come back and give us hope for some of those species, like the golden toad, that hasn't been seen in 30 years. But you start to think about that's this big, deep forest and how often do people go to this exact spot the exact right time of the year? And so we touch on a couple of those in the book. There's plenty more interesting stories. A few of them that happened in Costa Rica is that there's a species, the green eyed frog, that had disappeared from Monte Verde that has returned to Monteverde. Now there are other species like the variable harlequin frog that we thought was totally wiped out from Costa Rica and there are a handful, I think eight, populations now known to be back recovering in Costa Rica. And what's really interesting with that species, I was lucky enough to see one of those populations in March, is that the chytrid fungus has been detected in these populations, yet they are resilient. Which means they're doing their part in developing natural resistance to these factors that almost wiped them out. Chytrid, climate change, they're adapting. We need to do our part in preserving the forest so they have a place to come back to and helping to connect those populations so that there is some genetic diversity, there is a future, and there are not just these lonely pyres burning down. Because that's what they are right now. Jason Bradford 26:38 Yeah, the one that stuck with me was the relative the golden toad, I believe. Kyle Ritland 26:45 Yeah, yep. Jason Bradford 26:46 That's coming back. So that's pretty cool. You know that lineage has this representative still, and they're weird because they live underground almost all year. Like, what are they, like rodent holes or something? What are they doing? Trevor Ritland 27:00 Yeah, I know. And so that's the holdreges toad and the golden toad was also believed to be fossorial, living underground for most of the year. And that's just, it's another one of those little things that gnaws on you at night when you've made your peace with this species extinction. You know is, well, you know, maybe they're still out there and they're underground when we walk by and they were looking up at the dirt falling on their heads. And so, it gives you hope when those little stories come back. You couldn't make it up. I mean, if you wrote a fictional book about a missing toad that also goes underground for large periods of the year, it's like, yeah, of course it could still be out there. It's underground. Jason Bradford 27:37 Yeah. It feels a little bit like bigfoot or something like that. The generational difference between us is interesting to me to think about. I grew up in, you know, 70s, 80s, in college, in the 90s. And I think about the idea that, you know, we hadn't gone too far yet. Maybe we could pull back from the brink and there was this, you'd see trends but then there were negotiations. There were conferences, you know, in Rio, or whatever. We had the Montreal Protocol. And I've kind of become disillusioned since then, honestly. It's sad. But I think about like, I had a youth where I thought, okay, as a scientist, I'm going to make a difference here. And I think I've ort of lost that at least at the big institutional level. And I just wonder, like, you know you're -- I'm 56. How old are you guys? Trevor Ritland 28:43 32. And he's 32 and one minute older. Jason Bradford 28:48 So that's quite a bit. That's, that's, you know, a couple decades plus. What's it like growing up seeing that we kinda haven't done much? Trevor Ritland 28:58 Well let me give you some words of wisdom here, Jason, from my youthful perspective. I find hope in that the people that I meet on the ground more than I find hope in the big institutional processes. I mean, I think the big picture is always a pendulum and it seems like it's kind of swinging wider and wider instead of swinging down. It's like right now we're over here hoping we're going to swing back over here at some point. So it's hard to kind of have hope and optimism on a large scale when so many big political and institutional things are kind of tramping that hope down. But when I go to Costa Rica and I meet like the local farmer who turned his pasture into a nature reserve and discovered a new frog there, that gives me hope. You know, when I talk to Eladio Cruz, who's spent his whole life devoting it toward conservation after living on like the fifth generation of being a farmer who cut down trees for living, that gives me hope. The people running these little NGOs and nonprofits in Monteverde, like there's Corclima that does climate change mitigation, and like the Children's Eternal Rain Fores. They're gonna go one by one and talk to this farmer about buying his land, or convincing him to kind of let this patch of his land go a little bit wild so that there's a little bit more habitat. It's kind of a game of inches, but those people are the people that give me hope. So I look to those smaller stories. Kyle Ritland 30:31 I think I definitely agree with that. I mean, I think the thinking about the personal impact of things as opposed to the institutional impact of things. That's something I think about a lot. I mean, you know, we grew up in the time where we were told by recycling and trying not to drive as much that we would save the planet. And, you know, now we look at those things and say, that sounds a lot like big oil just wanting to take the burden off of them and put it on me. And yet at the same time, I think, you know, I've gone through that process as well of feeling hopeless and disillusioned because I don't feel like the institutions are getting us where we need to go through some of these projects that we've done, like Trevor says, to see the impact that individual people can have. And I'm not just talking about, you know, conservationists or scientists. In some of the work we've done in the southeastern U.S. where there are very vulnerable salamander populations, the southeast is the hot spot of salamander biodiversity in the world, you know, a single farmer choosing to not cut down all of the grass and vegetation along their creek bed, that might be what makes a difference for a species or a population of salamander. That's huge. And I think that there are a lot of things like that. And I think the other thing that kind of goes hand in hand with that is it can be very tempting when you do rely on the institutions to say, well, the institutions are going to handle it and I don't have to worry about it or think about it. And I think what we often see is a vicious cycle of, it's overwhelming so people tune out, so they disconnect. And I think the difference, if we're going to talk generations, I think one of the differences generationally is, you know, we heard the stories of our father growing up always out in nature, chasing butterflies, running through fields away from bulls in pursuit of butterflies at some points. And we, Trevor and I, were lucky enough to grow up with that. Like he created that experience for us because he knew it was valuable. And, you know, Trevor and I both became fathers this past year and now we feel tasked with that same thing. And it's harder now. You know, the nature around us is getting sliced and diced and paved over in many cases, and the distractions from the real world are getting stronger and more pernicious as well. Jason Bradford 33:00 What's the real world? Kyle Ritland 33:03 I think, yeah. I think the more that people can do to ground themselves and get out into nature. And that's why, you know, Trevor and I do these trips. And we started this little rinky dink non-profit with the idea of getting people out and seeing these species they never thought they would see. And when you do that, when you're able to connect with that, I think that just caring has such a huge impact, more so than people think. Jason Bradford 33:28 Yeah, I mean going back to Eladio, I think that's a really interesting story too. Like the transformation that happened in his mind on the way he looked at the forest, like you said, he was trying to settle the Panis Blancas Which the the San Luis Valley, is this drier valley where, you know, compared to Panis Blancas, you go over and it's just horrendous rainfall half the year, just incredible. And he built these little cabins and I stayed in those things. And the flies came out in the rainy season, I got chewed to bits. Trevor Ritland 34:02 Yeah, those are brutal. Jason Bradford 34:03 They're brutal. And I just go, like, wow. So, you know, there was this strive to sort of take over these places instead of leaving it for nature. And I see these stories you have about these farmers, right. Around here, oftentimes farmers are trying to, like, plow to the edge of their property line. Use every single bit for humans, for me, and it's amazing what you can do if you just say, like, no, no, let's realize we're part of nature here. We care about other species and setting aside a little bit, hold on. But what's interesting to me in all these cases is the idea that people need to get out and connect to land, right? They can't just be inside. They can't just be trapped in cities. And you guys had that opportunity as kids. I did this in like Cupertino, California, which was just a suburban hellscape that I lived in. But even that gave me the idea that there was something outside that was beautiful. So yeah, I think you're right in that boy, if you can give people that experience. So it's called Adventure Term, right? That's your nonprofit. The idea that spend a term of your school term just getting out, right? Is that the idea? Tell me more about it. Trevor Ritland 35:19 Yeah. So it started - It's called this because we had a winter term semester when we were in college, and Kyle and I had the bright idea to talk our teachers into letting us do an independent study to go down and make a documentary about crocodiles in the Everglades. And when I tell that story everybody says, "You mean alligators." And I go, "No, I mean crocodiles because there are American crocodiles in the Everglades. It's one of the reasons we want - " Kyle Ritland 35:41 It shows how much people don't know about these things, right? Trevor Ritland 35:46 And so we went down and we were just gonna do me and Kyle kind of running around and making our little documentary. And we started talking to our friends about it, and our friends who really weren't nature people thought it sounded really cool and and said, "Can I come? Is there a place for me?" So like, we made one of our friends be the social media person. We made one of our friends hold a camera. One person actually tied it back to a biology class where they, like, wrote about all the diseases and bad things that could happen to us down there. And so, like, we kind of started to realize, oh, people who don't think of themselves as, like, nature people or animal people have an innate interest in maybe not the nature side, maybe the more like adventure expedition side. And so that was the idea behind it. We kind of took that model and turned it into this nonprofit where we just invite students, or anybody who wants to learn about this stuff to come on these targeted little nature expeditions. So we've done the Borderlands of Southern Arizona, looking for Chiricahua leopard frogs and cactus ferruginous pygmy owls. We were also looking for jaguars. We didn't find any of those. We've done a trip to eastern North Carolina to look at Red Wolves and kind of the relationship, you know, fraught relationship, that they have out there. And then actually the golden toad story. We worked with some local high school students at the Quaker school there in Monteverde, and taught them kind of the basics of, here's some documentary filmmaking techniques and storytelling, and learned a lot from them, too, about their experiences growing up in Monteverde in that local perspective. And so, you know, the idea is if you're a budding science communicator, or just somebody who thinks it'd be cool to go look for crocodiles in the Everglades, come with us and see if it changes your perspective. And maybe you produce something. Maybe you learn to tell a story that has an impact on somebody else too. Jason Bradford 37:34 Oh my gosh. I wish I was 32 or so and could do that. Kyle Ritland 37:39 Hey, you're welcome to come anytime. Trevor Ritland 37:41 We'll plan on one together. Jason Bradford 37:43 Now, something that is interesting to me to think about is a lot of your examples, and the golden toad itself, is this really kind of rare species. It's this - And I bide a lot so, you know, when I see something that's rare, I get this massive rush of dopamine, and I understand the excitement. But then the thing that I wonder what happens is - This is what happens to me too, is like I see the same species, over and over again. Like I go out, there's another black capped chickadee or whatever. There's also this incredible appreciation of the familiar and the thing that's just like your neighbor, and you just start to learn more and more about it. So that's what I found is this dichotomy between, like, the rare novel versus who just gets into just loving the fact that all this is around us every day, and it doesn't have to be rare. In fact, it's that common everyday stuff that's just remarkable to me. So how do you bring people into that perspective? Kyle Ritland 38:45 I think that's one of the jokes of how we run these programs, is that, you know, it's always billed as this crazy species: the red wolf in North Carolina, the Florida panther in South Florida. And then along the way, it's all these other things that, you know, you could you recruit students based on these? Probably not. But now that they're here, they're interested in them. I mean, even in that first trip when we went down to South Florida, we're looking for American crocodiles. We get to do that and see them and experience that, and that's awesome. We probably spent six hours filming Great Blue Herons because that's what people were amazed by because they've never seen a great blue heron, you know, so close. And to try to get it on film is a fun experience. Jason Bradford 39:29 And to see with the scope, right? With the optics and you look at you go, "Oh my gosh. That bird has all that detail on its head, the feathers, oh my gosh." You know, they never stopped to watch it hunt and like, "It's eating a fish. Oh my god." I can just imagine, right? Kyle Ritland 39:44 Exactly, exactly. Jason Bradford 39:45 But the fact that exactly like, if you're like a kid growing out in the country it's like you've seen that 100 times, but if you haven't gotten out that's amazing to me. Kyle Ritland 39:53 I'm just as excited to see canyon tree frogs in Prescott, Arizona as I am to see glass frogs in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Like I'll take anything I can get. Tiger salamanders and cattle tank in Flagstaff is what I see now. You know, like you've got to work with what you got and those common species that are right out your backyard are sometimes just as cool because you can build this relationship with them, and you can get to know them. And you go, okay, that's that tiger salamander who lives in that cattle tank. You know, I think that relationship building is something you can do with those local common species that you can't necessarily do with this very charismatic but kind of untouchable species. And the other thing that goes with that, and Jason, I'm a birder too. And you know, I've had periods in my life where I, for one reason or another, have not been serious about birding for a couple years, and then I have the time and space to get back into it. And every time I do that, I'm reminded that you absolutely -- I always think about it like tuning a radio. You have to tune back into the right frequency to really start to notice how many birds are around you at any given moment at any given day. Because if you're not tuned into the right frequency, you go about your day, you don't think about it, you don't hear them, you don't see them. When you're tuned into the right frequency, they're everywhere. And every bird is something that you can stop and look at and hear. And I think that's true for everything. And hopefully, once you are out in nature and experience it and say you go on one of these trips and then you go back home, maybe now you're tuned into a frequency that you weren't before, and you're able to pick up on those things and notice what's in your own backyard. That's part of the reason why we like to do these trips, for the most part, within the United States. It's not this idea of you have to go to to experience nature. You have this stuff here. I bet most people could spend 20 minutes researching and find a crazy cool animal in their state that they did not know existed and could launch an expedition to go look for it. Jason Bradford 41:57 Oh, totally. I know. That's what's amazing to me, is like, what's in your backyard could be absolutely incredible. There were some Australian scientists that during COVID they they found like 1,000 species in their backyard. It was an amazing story. I don't remember the details. And I get mad at myself when I'm birding sometimes because my mind will wander and I'll start like, I'll answer a text or whatever. I'm also like, I'm going to bird for 20 minutes. And the next thing I know, I'm getting pulled into the modern world and I get mad, because the difference in my attention, like, if I'm really out there and I'm just in full awareness of what's going on around me, you're right. It's like, oh, there's a flicker over there. And I just heard a Swainson's thrush kind of make a little call. And, oh, I'm not sure what that is. Let me walk in that direction. And those are things you'll miss, right? And you won't know about. And so I think it's really healthy. I think we evolved to be aware of our environment. And now, you know, we spend a lot of time insulated in these kind of cocoons of the car and the built structures. So yeah, I think it makes you more of a human, a real human, to do that. Something that also was interesting to think about is that chytrid, you know, was so devastating, and you guys were doing a lot of this work during the pandemic. And that pandemic didn't like wipe out 99% of humanity, but by gosh, you know. You think of these things like the fungus that destroyed the chestnut, Eastern chestnut. Right now we've got an emerald ash borer that's raging across the U.S. And sometimes I just like, you know this came up during the pandemic, like, how bad is this going to be? And obviously it was some billions of people died, but there's still 8 billion people around. You just wonder, right? Given our world, what could happen? Kyle Ritland 44:04 Yeah. I mean, it was impossible for that not to be on our minds when, not only we were writing this book, but when we were kind of doing the things that we would later write about. I mean, we went back with Eladio to this spot in 2021 to look for golden toads in the photos of us were all wearing masks because that was summer of '21. It was still deep COVD time, and it was impossible not to draw those connections between this pandemic that these frogs went through and this pandemic that we as a species were going through. And what can we learn from what they went through and apply either here or the next one, because, of course, there'll be a next one. And hopefully we're learning from those things as we go. And those things that drove these frog species either to extinction or right to the brink, climate change and disease, those are like the two biggest things that are threatening our species too now, and in the next, you know, century. Can we learn and adapt to those things as quickly as some of these frogs did, or will we go the way of the golden toad? Those are big questions. Jason Bradford 45:13 Vamos a ver. Kyle Ritland 45:14 And from the disease perspective, you know, it's important to remember that chytrid wasn't just this flash in the pan more deadly than anything that had ever existed. It's a deadly disease, to be sure, but it was able to have the impact that it did because we live in a globalized world. And if you look at when it hit, you look at this is when the world was really becoming quickly interconnectable. And what we do know, we don't know everything about the origin spread of chytrid, but what we do know was that it was an established disease in Southeast Asia that was coexisting. You know, the species there had developed over eons, had evolutionary resistance to it. And then it, through the help of humanity, with no question about that, spread across the globe, and it met these vulnerable populations that had no resistance to it. And obviously we've seen that in human history, and we're going to see it again. And it is largely because of how we live in this connected world that allow these things to spread and to do so so quickly? So, yeah, it is a model for many diseases that have impacted humanity and many that certainly will. Jason Bradford 46:32 And there's a crazy connection to pregnancy tests. I mean, this is a great, Crazy Town story. Like, tell us about the pregnancy test connection to all Kyle Ritland 46:41 It's yeah. It's absolutely wild. It's one of these things that, when I was researching it, I had to keep digging further to make sure that this story was not fake. But yeah, basically, one of the ways that they used to check pregnancy was by injecting hormones into this frog, this African clawed frog, and seeing what would happen. And it functioned as effectively this pregnancy test where the frog would, you know, develop, show signs of pregnancy that could then be shown as a positive test. And so, these frogs were collected and shipped all across the globe. And it turns out that they were carriers of chytrid. And there are historical accounts of like, oh yeah, our fridge was overflowing with these frogs so we just opened it and they hopped out the door and they, you know, ran out into the into the stream outside. And, you know, it is an indicative story of how chytrid spread. It's not the only way that chytrid spread. But yeah, it's a perfect example of human beings tampering with something that we have no possible understanding of but just know that, hey, this seems to work for something that's convenient for us, so we're going to scoop up 1000's and millions of these frogs and ship them across the globe. Jason Bradford 48:05 Yeah, this is why I love talking to biologists, by the way. Because when I was in grad school, we had this thing called Friday beer hour, and every Friday at five we would get together, and is in Missouri, and we there was a fridge and you put 50 cents in a jar, and you get a cheap beer, and you just and then all that would happen for the next, like two hours or more, maybe you order pizza. Was crazy. Stories like this would just come up, and there was an endless font of wondrous awe and madness, usually, but that that's what it's like to be a human this day and age, isn't it? Trevor Ritland 48:46 Yeah, well, and that's, I think that's, you know, I love biologists are, like, the best storytellers, and they have the best stories and, like, that's how we came to this story is basically a tall tale from our dad of like, oh, you won't believe about this Crazy Frog I heard about, you know. So, like, the it's funny that those stories are still having an impact. That, you know, brought us all to this conversation right now is, like, all this came from a story Kyle and I heard from our biologist dad. Jason Bradford 49:14 Well, that that's great. I'm glad you had a biologist dad, and I'm glad that you're a couple of youngish guys that are adventuresome, but also know how to sort of connect to people and give them this sense of awe and appreciation and figure out what part they can do. Because I think you're right. You know, the initiative you can take, the control you have in your own life, is something important to develop. So. Kyle Trevor, congratulations on the book. The book title yet, the golden toad, and what's the subtitle? Trevor Ritland 49:51 Again, the subtitle is an ecological mystery and the search for lost species, Jason Bradford 49:57 Okay, The Golden Toad: An ecological mystery and the search for lost species. Well, it was really good meeting you and talking and feeling the nostalgia again. And so thank you guys for coming on to the Crazy Town podcast. Trevor and Kyle Ritland 50:05 Thanks for having us great talking to you too, and thanks for the stories and keep telling crazy stories. Alex Leff 50:23 This is Crazy Town producer Alex Leff. If you like what you heard, please share Crazy Town with your friends and family. And before signing off, take a minute to listen to this chorus of fire-bellied toads, and consider what you can do to make sure these sounds remain part of the fabric of nature for generations to come.
