Lazarus

摘要

In March 2013, Twan Leenders and a student were hiking in the Cocobolo reserve in central Panama when they spotted a precious jewel: a delicate string of white pearls floating at the bottom of a rocky puddle at a stream's edge. "That was absolutely tremendous," says Leenders. "Everything fit for Atelopus, there was nothing else it could be." Leenders, a herpetologist at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York, has spent his career studying tropical frogs and toads. That had mostly meant documenting their astonishing decline. Climate change and human encroachment on the amphibians' favoured habitats were a major part of the problem - as was the advance of the deadly chytrid fungus.