22

Herpetology Moments

Good teachers can make a difference and influence important career decisions in your life. I had a wonderful professor of herpetology in college (Marylyn Bachman) and a teaching assistant (Mike Lannoo) who made amphibians and reptiles so interesting that it was impossible for me not to fall in love with these animals for the rest of my life! I was raised in Cali, Colombia, where my parents had a home in mountains surrounded by cloud forest. My appreciation for nature, and my inclination to become a field biologist, probably came from my childhood excursions to the forest and early encounters with colorful snakes and frogs that frightened my friends but fascinated me with their body shapes and intriguing behaviors. Of the six kids in my family, I was the youngest and the only one who chose an unusual career.

Being interested in amphibians and reptiles and working in the forests at night to study frogs was not very typical for a woman at the time, and as a young herpetologist I faced several challenges. First, for my master´s fieldwork I had to convince my parents to let me venture into the mountains of southern Colombia, where armed groups had started to rise. Also, the director of the La Planada Reserve where I did my work had no faith in me and made my life harder by banishing me to a building being built for future science visitors, claiming that I was the first. The walk from the scientific center to the reserve headquarters where meals were served was about 1 km, and at the time the building did not have electricity or running water. However, to his surprise, neither isolation, solitude, nor the constant pouring rain discouraged me from conducting my work. Every night I came back excited with my new discoveries of cool frogs that had unique reproductive strategies and of new morpho species of a very diverse group of arboreal frogs (genus Pristimantis) that were likely new to science.

One night, when returning late from monitoring amphibians in a transect, I heard a loud BOP very close to me. Bill Duellman, my major professor, had told me that there was a frog in northern Ecuador that lived in the high canopy and made a loud call like this. I had also been told by the native people in the reserve that this sound belonged to the cry of the spirit of a little girl that once got lost in the forest. I kept walking in the direction of the call, and then, right at my eye level, sitting in a tree branch and looking at me, I saw the most beautiful frog I had ever seen! It was a male Dentate Marsupial Frog (Gastrotheca guentheri). Female marsupial frogs have a dorsal pouch in which they brood fertilized eggs. Adult G. guentheri have a mustard-yellow coloration with longitudinal black markings and large eyes with horns on the eyelids. About a month later, I found a female very close to the ground; her dorsal pouch was full of eggs. I kept her in my cottage during the night and woke up to the clatter of this bagged frog jumping all over the floor. Every time she jumped a small emerald-green froglet with tiny horns on the eyelids emerged from her back. It is difficult to describe the feelings I experienced at the time, but imagine if you can, a mixture of the tenderness that comes with motherhood and the excitement of discovery—definitely one of the most thrilling moments of my life as a herpetologist!

But doing fieldwork in herpetology brings all kinds of moments. There were scary moments, like the time when I was almost bitten by an Eyelash Viper (Bothriechis schlegelii) in Costa Rica. I had the luck to share my Organization for Tropical Studies course with several herpetologists. We were all young and energetic and used all our free time to go herping. One day while measuring the diameter of a tree trunk, one of my team partners, Joe Slowinski, very calmly said to me: Pacha, drop the meter and step back slowly. I did not question him. As I did as I was told, I saw a perfectly camouflaged Eyelash Viper about 20 cm away from where my hand had been. It is ironic and very sad to think that while Joe saved my life that time in Costa Rica, he died from a snake bite years later in Asia.

There were also itchy moments. Chigger bites made our lives miserable in Cuzco Amazónico (Madre de Dios, Peru), because our campsite was in a cleared area where pasture grew tall and provided ideal habitat for chiggers during the rainy season. Relief came when a colleague, David Hillis, joined us for a few weeks and brought a generous quantity of sulfur powder. It turns out that sulfur discourages chiggers from burying in your skin, so by mixing it with Johnson’s talc and applying it in our socks and clothing, we were able to go from frantically scratching to stinking like rotten eggs all the day—totally worth it! David also brought Kit-Kats for me. I love Kit-Kats and hate beans (all colors), which constituted the core of our daily meals in the Amazon. So while they lasted, I had the luxury of complementing my limited diet of rice and papaya with loads of sugary calories!

I also experienced several near-death moments in the field. One I will never forget was in Colombia when I fell through a hole in the forest and into a stream in a steep canyon from which I was not able to climb out until daybreak—exhausted and suffering from hypothermia. However, what I remember most in my life as a field biologist are the moments of camaraderie that resulted from sharing exciting moments of discovery, despite adversities, with the many colleagues and students that became my friends.

I have been married twice, and both of my husbands have been herpetologists. My mother used to say that it was a great idea to marry someone from your same profession because you would never run out of conversation. Well, that is certainly true for Ignacio De la Riva and me, but I would add that it also helps having a spouse who understands your needs to work at night and often in remote, faraway places. Ignacio and I started working together in Bolivia to try to understand the drastic decline of amphibian species, many of which Ignacio had discovered and described in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were still abundant. We traveled all over the country to sample extant species of frogs for the pathogenic chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, responsible for the decline of many amphibians worldwide. We also ran field experiments to test the vulnerability of high Andean species to climate warming. One of the highlights of these trips was seeing how Ignacio used Google Earth to predict the localities in the inter-Andean valleys where undescribed species of small, terrestrial direct-developing frogs from the genus Microkayla might occur. It was like magic to me, although, in reality, it was the result of careful study of this group of frogs and their pattern of speciation in the high Andes.

In 2016, we walked the Takesi route, a pre-Colombian trading path used by the Incas that extends from the high puna in La Paz to the cloud forests of Los Yungas. Ignacio had identified a specific location in the route where a new species of Microkayla might occur. We had booked a guide and a porter at an ecotourist venue at La Paz. The agency turned out to be incredibly disorganized and oblivious to what people might need when camping at high altitudes in the Andes. After many years of working in Bolivia, Ignacio knew better than to trust the agency operator when he said there was no need for us to bring sleeping bags, extra warm clothing, or snacks because they would take care of everything. If we had not brought our own share of all those things, we would have undoubtedly starved and/or frozen to death. Perhaps it was just coincidence, or perhaps there is a God of Science, but on the first night we had to camp earlier than planned because it got dark and our guide did not want to continue the expedition. We were close but not at the exact GPS coordinates where Ignacio suspected the occurrence of a new species. We started to set up camp, and as dusk turned into night, we heard frogs calling. Ignacio knew it was one he had never heard before and most likely of an unknown Microkayla species. Excited, we looked around until we found the first frog under a rock, and then the second, and then a whole series including all age classes and both sexes, enough material for a thorough description of the new species! It was not the only time this happened to us in the Andes, and every time it was an incredible joy!

Working with students in the same place for many years gives a field biologist a sense of understanding of an ecological system that is beyond scientific data. Rafael Joglar and I began to monitor a highland population of the common Puerto Rican Coqui (Eleutherodactylus coqui), and the work has continued over 35 years. I have directed numerous graduate and undergraduate student projects, many of which led to theses and publications on the biology of these frogs. I have spent innumerable nights in the forest studying their behavior, movements, advertisement calls, mating sites, microbiome, and disease prevalence. And now, I feel that my hunches are educated guesses and that the knowledge I have acquired about this system allows me to keep formulating interesting hypotheses, without wasting time on unrealistic predictions. This feeling gives me a remarkable sense of accomplishment that comes only from studying animals in the field. Perhaps this is why I am reluctant to share my raw data when I publish the results of my work. Those brilliant scientists who have never gone to the field, but sit behind a computer and make impressive analyses of metadata collected by field biologists, will hardly have the criteria to reject results that make absolutely no sense in light of the species taxonomy, geographic location, season of the year, or interaction with other biotic factors intrinsic to the site where the data were collected. This is why, as much as I welcome technology and use it to facilitate my work, I feel that what a biologist learns by being in the field can never be replaced by automated remote sensors.

It is an interesting coincidence that I started to write this essay in La Planada, the place where I truly became a field biologist. After I finished my master’s work in 1986, no other comprehensive study of the herpetofauna took place because the presence of armed groups in the area made it very dangerous to work there. The reserve was eventually shut down in 2007 after the director was killed on site by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). After the peace treaty in Colombia was signed in 2016, I saw the opportunity to fulfill my dream of returning to La Planada to re-do my master´s thesis. I wanted to see what had happened to the diversity of amphibians that I had described and quantified more than 30 years ago. Would the exacerbation of global climate change and/or the arrival of emergent infectious diseases like amphibian chytridiomycosis have taken a toll? It took no effort to get Ignacio excited about this, and after considerable work we got the funding to return to La Planada. We brought with us a young graduate student, Claudia Lansac, who has agreed to be me and replicate my work from 1986. We have found that the cloud forest is intact and that the Awa native people, who are now in charge of the reserve, are committed to preserving the area and promoting scientific research. However, many species of frogs have disappeared (among them, my beloved Gastrotheca guentheri), and many of those that are extant are rare compared with 1986. La Planada is another example of biodiversity loss in the sixth mass extinction that we are so unfortunately witnessing today. Let us hope that science may lead us to identifying the culprits of these declines in the wild and of ways to reverse their action, so that among many other reasons, young herpetologists like Claudia can have their own herpetological moments.