The Golden Toad
An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and a vanished species: with support from Leonardo DiCaprio’s Re:wild campaign, twin documentarians and environmental writers follow their father’s footsteps into the heart of the modern extinction crisis.
As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain—alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive?
In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists—including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive—Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, finally intertwining at the site of the golden toad’s last emergence deep in Monteverde’s Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.
The toad’s demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crisis, but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trevor and Kyle Ritland, twin brothers and documentarians, debut with an overwrought investigation into the extinction of the golden toad, a native of Costa Rica's cloud forests whose last recorded sighting was in 1989. The authors alternate between discussing the global collapse of amphibian populations in the 1990s and their efforts to determine if any golden toads remain in the wild. Despite presenting themselves as detectives seeking to solve the "ecological mystery" behind the mass frog die-offs, their research shows scientists have known the cause for decades: a parasitic fungus that fatally inhibits frogs from regulating their electrolyte levels. The authors' search for a living golden toad is similarly underwhelming. Providing reason for hope, they point out that a 2010 campaign to find supposedly extinct frogs led to the "rediscovery" of 15 species, but this only makes the brothers' decision to give up after a single night of camping on a Costa Rican ridgetop all the more baffling. Worse, they implausibly play up their brief sojourn with grandiose allusions to conquistadors' quest for El Dorado and florid prose ("The lonely forest swayed in the slow wind, reaching out wet and woody hands in consolation; we were only now encountering the grief , but the forest had been living with it"). This falls flat.
