Goodbye Froggie

The other day I was lucky enough to interview the producer of the new BBC nature series Life in Cold Blood, which is all about Reptiles and Amphibians. He told me a story which is featured in the series, about the Panamanian Golden Frog. It's one amazing creature, this frog, bright yellow with a black stripe. The male of the species will sit on the riverbank and, when it spies another frog, wave at it. To other male frogs, this is a bit like a shake of the fist - look at my muscles! To a female it's, well, much the same, only with a different aim...

A couple of years ago the producer contacted scientists in the region to talk about this frog and they told him, you'd better get here quick because we don't know how long this frog is going to be around. Apparently there's a nasty fungus which is spreading along river systems all over the world, and it is killing amphibians at such a rate that people are comparing the situation to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Anyway, the producer rushed over to Panama and filmed the Panamanian Golden Frog, which he described as a truly amazing creature. Scientists went along too, and did experiments to see whether the frog would wave at its own reflection or at a frog on a TV screen. And then, some time later, the fungus reached the homeland of the Panamanian Golden Frog and local scientists scooped up the last remaining population and took them into captivity.

The frog has waved its last in the wild, but it is about to become a TV star.

As a producer of nature programmes I suppose you get used to extinction, but I found this story disturbing. What you're wondering though is, are we to blame? The answer is, quite possibly. The killer fungus seems to have travelled from Africa along with the South African Clawed Frog, which is used by people all over the world. You see the South African Clawed Frog is very useful to us humans, because if you inject one with the urine of a pregnant woman it will produce eggs. Yes, this particular frog is a living pregnancy testing kit.

What does this tell us? With their thin skins, amphibians are incredibly sensitive animals. A frog may help us detect a pregnancy, but perhaps the rapid decline in species across the world should give us another kind of warning.