Sometimes she would pick up a frog and it would die in her hands. But, before long, Lips began to find corpses lying in the streams and moribund animals sitting on the banks. Initially, the frogs there seemed healthy. She picked another isolated spot in the rain forest, this time in western Panama. Since the frogs at her old site had pretty much disappeared, she decided that she needed to find a new location to do research.

Lips finished her dissertation and got a teaching job. The pathologist was also baffled: the specimens, she told Lips, showed no signs of any known disease.Ī few years went by. She collected all the dead frogs that she came across-there were only a half dozen or so-and sent their bodies to a veterinary pathologist in the United States. Lips couldn’t figure out what was happening. She returned a few months later, and though nothing seemed to have changed, she could hardly find any frogs. Once she had collected enough data, she left to work on her dissertation. “It was a wonderland,” she recalled recently. Lips spent two years living in the mountains. In order to get to the site, she had to drive two hours from the nearest town-the last part of the trip required tire chains-and then hike for an hour through the rain forest.

Lips was planning to study the local frogs, some of which, she later discovered, had never been identified. In the early nineteen-nineties, an American graduate student named Karen Lips established a research site about two hundred miles west of El Valle, in the Talamanca Mountains, just over the border in Costa Rica. It is considered a lucky symbol in Panama-its image is often printed on lottery tickets-though it could just as easily serve as an emblem of disaster. The golden frog, which is bright yellow with dark-brown splotches, is endemic to the area around El Valle. There are golden frogs wearing frilly skirts, and golden frogs striking dance poses, and ashtrays featuring golden frogs smoking cigarettes through a holder, after the fashion of F.D.R. There are golden frogs sitting on leaves and-more difficult to understand-golden frogs holding cell phones. El Valle has one main street, a police station, and an open-air market that offers, in addition to the usual hats and embroidery, what must be the world’s largest selection of golden-frog figurines. The crater is almost four miles across, but when the weather is clear you can see the jagged hills that surround the town, like the walls of a ruined tower. The town of El Valle de Antón, in central Panama, sits in the middle of a volcanic crater formed about a million years ago. Some estimates suggest that, if current trends continue, half the world’s species may disappear by the end of this century.

The sixth mass extinction book