Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

We are here in the Mamonee Valley to do our very first captive bred frog releases.

Back in 2016, Camperio was working with frog researchers at the Smithsonian's century-old Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

They were trying to reintroduce these really rare and unbelievably cool harlequin toads that have skin with a splatter pattern like a giraffe.

They've been trying to breed the frogs for about a decade so they could release them into the wild to jumpstart the population.

I love it there.

So this person got their PhD at Howard University studying the paleobiology of cetaceans, and has worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

We met up at LA's Natural History Museum a few weeks back, and he ushered me into his bone-filled office with a smile.

He was wearing a short-sleeve chambray blue shirt and some black thick-framed glasses.

And so the first story is about butterflies, but it's about a peculiar and very, uh, cool, I guess, new discovery about some recent, uh, species of a butterfly.

So this was found on Science, uh, Tech Daily out of the University of Bristol, uh, which is in the UK, and then the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which is in Pan- Panama, which I didn't even know the Smithsonian, like they had, um, an institute also in like foreign places like in, uh, Panama, like outside the US, so pretty cool.

So scientists discover a butterfly that barely seems to age.

And so this is about the, um, Heliconius butterflies.

toads.It was predicted that these animals might be in the path of the amphibian chytrid fungus.

So they were the subject of a large rescue operation where zoos and aquariums from the United States paired up with some Panamanian scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and they went and collected a founding population of these animals to take into captivity before the chytrid fungus arrived.

And then after the chytrid fungus arrived, they did disappear from the wild.

So, uh, this is a species that is thought to be extinct in the wild, but there are about 2,000 of them living in zoos and aquariums in the United States.