Guest Blog: Stopping a Capital Environmental Crime: The Rocket Frog and Intag’s Future
Author: Carlos Zorilla. To the human eye, the mostly dark-green Confusing Rocket Frog is not as attractive as the Harlequin Longnose Frog. Both amphibians are found in a patch of forest in Ecuador’s Intag region and nowhere else on the planet. The Harlequin’s discovery in 2016 was amazing enough, since the it hadn’t been seen since 1989 (the IUCN still lists it as extinct). But, even so, quite a bit was known about it. Being endemic to an area which today is threatened by a large-scale copper mining project, the Harlequin shares the same potential fate as the much rarer Confusing Rocket Frog, which was rediscovered in August of 2019. The finding, by Ecuador’s Jambatu Center, is so recent, that nothing has been written up in journals yet*.