The notion of a human falling in love with a bug-eyed amphibian is so preposterous that the Brothers Grimm used it to test the character of a princess. That fairy tale continues to inspire jokes, memes and endless metaphors (even though in the original version the princess threw the frog against a wall, which triggered his transformation into a prince).
Cranky princesses aside, there is a long, rich history of human-frog love. The amphibians generally mean us no harm, they come in an array of gorgeous hues and that bug-eyed baby face can be ugly cute. They even sing. After a long day at work, I like to seek out a frog pond near my house, stand in the dusk and listen to their burbling symphony.
So it’s no surprise that humankind responded with collective dismay when news broke in the 1990s that frogs around the world were dying from a fungal epidemic. Many people didn’t just mourn; they leaped into action to help make the world safe for hopping, ribbiting amphibians. And they’ve made progress.
In this issue, we take you to the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, where biologist Roland Knapp of the University of California, Santa Barbara has worked for the last three decades to protect frogs in the wild. That includes figuring out how some individuals infected with the chytrid fungus sidestep death. For years, Knapp has been transporting those survivors to mountain lakes, where he hopes the transplants will form new, fungus-proof colonies.
It’s been a battle fought on many fronts. An early system for transporting frogs in damp cloth bags resulted in some tragic deaths, so the frogs now travel safely in sturdy plastic containers. The teams also seek out lakes that don’t freeze all the way to the bottom; the frogs need a pocket of water below the ice to survive the winter.
Other efforts in the fight for frogs include seeking the genetic variations that help some of them resist the fungus, and testing to see if providing frogs in Australia with toasty-warm hideouts will keep the disease at bay in winter. The work is far from done, but the narrative is shifting from a murder mystery to — hopefully — a modern fairy tale. It shows how dogged fieldwork and basic research have combined to combat a seemingly impervious foe.
If you’re in the mood for more true tales of legendary critters, check out the exquisite trilobite fossils preserved by a volcanic eruption in Morocco and a Jurassic Park–style method that stores DNA in an amberlike material. And let us introduce you to a newfound dinosaur dubbed Lokiceratops rangiformis, so named because its impressive horns evoke the Norse god Loki. Finally, we have a poignant report on the mysterious end of the world’s last woolly mammoths, which died marooned on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean. Even though those creatures perished some 4,000 years ago, the remains of structures that Indigenous residents built with scavenged mammoth tusks serve as a haunting reminder of the time when these great beasts roamed the Earth.