In Search of Hispaniola’s Mystery Toad - via Herp Digest

By Jennie Erin Smith, 1/7/15, The New Yorker

The southernmost corner of the Dominican Republic is dominated by limestone karst, a landscape with the look and feel of a petrified giant sponge. Snakes, small mammals, and fat, furry tarantulas live in the fissures and holes in the karst, as do toads, including one species that is not yet fully known to science. I met this new toad at three o’clock one late-fall morning, in a karst forest off a mining road near the town of Pedernales. I was with Miguel Landestoy and Robert Ortiz, a pair of freelance field biologists who have been friends since their youth, and who still spend much of their time looking for amphibians. The toad that we found—the only one we found that night—was a young female. She appeared to be content, floating in a hole filled with water and algae. Her belly was a brilliant white, her back speckled in black and green. She had big eyes spaced widely apart, like a goat’s, and a tiny upturned nose. (If not for this nose, she might have looked like a Puerto Rican crested toad, another karst-dwelling species.) As we crouched closer, she headed for the leaf litter. Ortiz noticed something about the way that she jumped—high but not long. Maybe it was a behavioral adaptation, he thought, a way to get around the karst.

The new toad species was first photographed in March, 2012, when a team of scientists, accompanied by a BBC film crew, came to Pedernales in pursuit of solenodons—ancient shrew-like mammals that also inhabit these forests. Ros Kennerley, a solenodon researcher at the University of Reading, in England, was clambering around the karst when she noticed a toad just sitting there. “I’d not seen anything similar before,” she told me, and neither had the Dominican biologists who accompanied her. They decided not to collect it, just to take pictures. It was only later, Kennerley said, “that we realized it might be something special.” The possible discovery of another toad on Hispaniola was big herpetological news. No new amphibian had been described there since the nineteen-nineties, and one of the island’s three previously identified native toads hadn’t been seen since 1971. Moreover, the finding promised to help evolutionary biologists parse the complex relationships among the species that inhabit the Greater Antilles; a toad in the Dominican Republic might have its closest relative in Cuba or Puerto Rico. But for two years after the British team’s departure no one managed to spot the new toad again—not until Landestoy and Ortiz came to Pedernales.

The two men grew up in the town of Bani, about an hour from the Dominican capital; Ortiz is married to Landestoy’s cousin. They have no institutional affiliations (not lately, anyway). Landestoy makes most of his money as a birding guide, and Ortiz began freelancing not long after a “Jerry McGuire”-style incident at Santo Domingo’s Museum of Natural History, in which he presented his bosses with an eight-page letter containing suggestions for how to do things better. They ramble around the island in Landestoy’s weathered Isuzu truck, often with Landestoy driving and Ortiz puffing anxiously on an electronic cigarette. They conduct biological surveys for the government and for mining firms, and help foreign scientists in the field. This past summer, they were working on a grant to find the toad that went AWOL in 1971. In August, feeling discouraged with their progress, they drove south to see about the mysterious new toad.

For decades, Pedernales has been known for its bauxite. The ore, a precursor to aluminum, is, in effect, a product of the karst: the chemical and physical processes that create depressions in the limestone can also cause bauxite to accumulate in them. Extracting the bauxite involves digging up the karst, something akin to taking a colossal ice-cream scoop to the earth. The U.S. company Alcoa set up mining operations in the town in the nineteen-fifties; by the late eighties, it had left behind large swaths of sunken red moonscape. The mines were largely dormant until the recent arrival of a company that exports bauxite to China. When Landestoy and Ortiz arrived in Pedernales, they were taken aback by how close the new mines came to the edge of the region’s two national parks. Even more distressing was that women were leaving the parks with bunches of logs on their heads; inside them, men were cutting down trees by the hectare. Pedernales lies across a wide dry riverbed from Anse-à-Pitres, Haiti, and thousands of Haitians work on the Dominican side of the border each day. Some had begun living in the parks, burning the tree stumps and planting beans and corn in the soot-filled holes.

The first toad that Landestoy and Ortiz found was hopping around the charred remains of a supposedly protected forest. During two days and nights, they collected and preserved ten specimens of both sexes, along with some eggs and tadpoles. Landestoy, it was agreed, would write the paper describing the species; taxonomy does not always lend itself well to joint efforts. But a formal description would take time—analyzing the toads’ DNA, sending samples to foreign institutions for corroboration—and Landestoy, though he’d worked with many highly placed scientists over the years, had the disadvantage of being a freelancer with no formal degree. The pace of the habitat destruction meant that this already rare toad might be all but extinct by the time his description was published. New farm plots were smoldering, and without tree cover more karst would dry out, losing its ability to shelter toads. When I visited Pedernales, I saw that a Haitian family had erected tents and a small thatched house within sight of one park’s main gate. It was probably the least promising farmland I’d ever seen, like a dead coral reef. But these were also some of the poorest people in the hemisphere.

Haitians are frequently maligned in the Dominican Republic, often for imaginary offenses, but no one was under the illusion that they were behind the clearing in the parks. “It’s old-fashioned sharecropping,” Yolanda Leon, a biologist in Santo Domingo, told me. A Dominican appropriates a plot in the park, she said, puts his barbed wire around it, puts his tenants on it, pays them nothing, gets a portion of their meagre crop, “and hopes to get grandfathered in, years from now, as the legal owner.” Leon’s environmental nonprofit, Grupo Jaragua, has been making noise about the Pedernales parks for months, disseminating photos of roasted wildlife lying belly-up on the scorched earth. In recent weeks, the Dominican press has begun paying attention to Leon and her colleagues’ complaints, and last month the director of the environment ministry in Pedernales was fired for handing out permits to Dominicans to clear plots in the national parks. Still, the problem seemed deeper seated than anything that the sacking of a bureaucrat might resolve. I asked Leon whether she thought that this new amphibian would draw the same kind of attention as the Puerto Rican crested toad, which was once nearly extirpated from that island’s karst forests but has received copious help in the past thirty years, much of it from American zoos breeding tadpoles for release. “I doubt it,” Leon said. “We’re not on U.S. soil.”

On the afternoon of our return from Pedernales to Landestoy’s mother’s home, in Bani, ten of the mystery toads sat on a coffee table, suspended in a jar of alcohol. Landestoy ate a piece of cake, staring at them, while Ortiz drank a beer, engrossed in his laptop. Landestoy had decided to measure and label the toads in Bani rather than depositing them at the Museum of Natural History. It was easier than driving into Santo Domingo every day, he explained, and, as with any new discovery, a little discretion never hurt. The two still hadn’t thought of what to call the new species, but they agreed that under no circumstances should it be named after any wives or girlfriends. That was the taxonomic equivalent of a bad tattoo.