It seems to be a rare situation in which a species is confined to a geographical range that happens to be under the control of a human group dedicated to saving the species, and I just have to like it. From NewScientist (21 December 2019):
Image: Fundación Atelopus
A critically endangered harlequin toad, known as the starry night toad, has been documented by biologists for the first time since 1991 in the mountains of Colombia. But unlike other such stories of “rediscovered” species, this one was never really lost – the local Arhuaco people knew exactly where the toad, which they call “gouna”, was all along.
“We have shared our home with the gouna for thousands of years,” says Ruperto Chaparro Villafaña, who represents the Arhuaco community of Sogrome near where the toad lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. For them, the toad is both an important indicator of the health of the ecosystem, whose presence guides their agricultural activities, and a link to the spiritual world, representing their mission to preserve life on Earth. …
Getting access to the area to see if the toad was still present took years of work building trust and friendship between the researchers and the Sogrome community, says Jefferson Villalba, co-founder of Fundación Atelopus, a Colombian conservation group.
He and his colleagues met with the community and its spiritual leaders, called mamos, multiple times over five years. They were eventually allowed to travel to see the toad in April this year, without taking pictures. Having passed that test of trust, they were permitted to return and document the toad alongside members of the community. They found a healthy population of around 30 individuals.
I’m sure if there was some commercial value to these toads, industry would scream bloody murder over this behavior, screeching about the rights of everyone to have access, right up until they’d achieved dominion over them, and then not a peep would be heard about those rights.
But kudos to the Arhuaco! I’m sure they don’t care about me, but they care about the toads. And while I’m not much for ‘spiritual worlds’, that’s OK. It’s leading in the right direction.
