The Frog Keepers

In recounting the drama of animal ownership within zoos and aquariums, few species pose as great of a headache as the Panamanian golden frog.  The story of golden frogs in American zoos is a fairly short one - about 20 years.  Not that there was much of a golden frog story before then, either.  The frogs were barely studied in their wild habitat in Panama when, in the early 2000s, the deadly chytrid fungus began working its way down Central America.  Teams from The Baltimore Zoo and Detroit Zoo collected as many frogs as they could to start an emergency captive breeding population.

It's lucky that they did.  Shortly after the time that they were collecting, the BBC was in Panama trying to get footage for the frogs as a follow up to a segment they'd shot for the David Attenborough series Life in Cold Blood.  There were none to be found - nor have any been seen since.  The Panamanian golden frog is likely extinct in the wild. 

In situations such as this, it's customary for ownership of animals to be held by the range country.  Panama, however, had neither the resources nor the personnel to carry out a breeding program, or track ownership of frogs (themselves a fast-reproducing species) in foreign zoos.  Instead, the decision was made to have ownership of all frogs in the name of The Baltimore Zoo, since renamed the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.  All frogs in the US (and now in Canada) are in the zoo's name.

Ownership comes with some conditions in the import permits issued by the US government - for example, Baltimore is not allowed to send the frogs outside of AZA, with the exception of some that go to university labs for research.  There have been strict efforts to keep the frogs out of the private sector and the pet trade, which appear to have been successful (if there are frogs out there illegally, they're being kept very quietly).  Among other benefits, this prevents the possibility of these frogs being hybridized with other frog species, which would contaminate the gene pool in the hopeful eventuality of a reintroduction program.  So concerned are the zoos about this that there isn't just a studbook for golden frogs - there are three, based on three separate populations that were rescued by the zoos in the early 2000s.  It's a good thing that they were tracked separately, because it turns out that one population was actually a different species than the other two.

Compared to mammals and birds, frogs can be tricky to keep track off.  They breed in huge numbers, transition through different life stages, and tend to look a lot alike, all of which can make it hard for zoos to monitor their numbers.  The problem is complicated because some zoos manage their frogs not as individual animals but as groups, with, say, a group of 20 frogs being tracked as a single entity.  

This has made the Panamanian golden frog one of the most difficult animal populations to accurately monitor in US zoos - but having a single owning entity to keep track of all frogs and with the ability to enforce decisions about where they go and when and to whom they are bred has helped keep it from descending into utter chaos.  All of this will hopefully pay off, someday, when a well-managed, genetically-diverse population of frogs can be successfully and safely reintroduced to Panama.