Case of the missing frogs…
At 7am on January 13, 1984, ranger Keith McDonald was driving along a dirt road deep in the rainforest of Eungella National Park, 80km west of Mackay, when one of the most implausible events in the natural world occurred on the passenger seat beside him.
Inside a container of water, a female frog he had collected from a stream the night before opened her mouth and spat out a fully formed juvenile frog. Over the next half-hour, 14 more froglets were born through their mother’s mouth. As any child will tell you, frogs don’t give birth through their mouth. They don’t give birth at all. They lay eggs, which hatch into tadpoles and metamorphose into frogs underwater. It was the first and last time anyone would see the unique birthing approach of the northern gastric-brooding frog. By March of 1985 the frogs, endemic to this one area on Earth, were gone, never to be seen again.
It wasn’t the only species to go. Since 1979, scientists had reported that frogs in south-east Queensland were declining. The Mount Glorious day frog was the first to go missing in action, and the southern gastric-brooding frog — like its northern cousin, it gestated young in its stomach and gave birth through the mouth — vanished in 1981, just seven years after its discovery. It wasn’t just Australia. Once abundant frogs of South, Central and North America were vanishing. More worryingly, no one could figure out why…
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