Chapter 1 - Admir Basic

In chapter one of The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert introduced the golden frog as a symbol of wildlife in El Valle De Antón, Panamá. This town was described as having a main road with a couple of emergency services and open-air markets. In the markets, the golden frog was a common figurine sold in many styles. People appreciated the species since it was so common in the area. In page 5 of the book, “one creek not far from El Valle was nicknamed Thousand Frog Stream. A person walking along it would see so many golden frogs sunning themselves on the banks that, as one herpetologist who made the trip many times put it to me, ‘it was insane-absolutely insane’.” Sadly, the golden frog and amphibians, in general, were disappearing from Panama at an alarming rate. In page 12, a professor named Wake was mystified about why his students were coming back from frog-collecting trips empty-handed. “Wake assumed his students were going to the wrong spots, or that they just didn’t know how to look.” He then told a postdoc that he would also go on the frog collecting trips to some “proven places” that Wake recalled. “I took him out to this proven place, and we found like two toads.” (R) I find it ironic that the teacher was wrong this time and the students were making correct claims about amphibians disappearing. It is shocking that current students cannot experience the days when toads were abundant in these places. This connects to the theme that science is a process and realizing the amphibians are disappearing is a key realization to start developing solutions to prevent future amphibian extinction. Another realization was in page 13 in which a vet “took some samples from the dead frogs” only to find “a strange microorganism on the animals’ skin, which he eventually identified as a fungus.” The fungi known as chytrid fungi are distributed across the world and are the culprit behind the declining amphibian populations.