4000 Homeless Toads

"This is a story about a waterfall, the World Bank and 4,000 homeless toads.

"Maybe the story will have a happy ending, and the bright-golden spray toads, each so small it could sit easily on a dime, will return to the African gorge where they once lived, in the spray of a waterfall on the Kihansi River in Tanzania.

"The river is dammed now, courtesy of the bank. The waterfall is 10 percent of what it was. And the toads are now extinct in the wild.

"But 4,000 of them live in the Bronx and Toledo, Ohio, where scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society [& its Bronx Zoo] and the Toledo Zoo are keeping them alive in hopes, somehow, of returning them to the wild."

"The spray toads, Nectophrynoides asperginis, were unknown to science until 1998, when they were found living on less than five acres, perhaps the smallest known range of any vertebrate. They are unusual in that they do not lay eggs. The baby toads emerge fully formed, each one small enough to fit on the head of a pin."

"The problem then was how to keep them alive. The Bronx Zoo sent toads to five other zoos in the United States, but only one of them, the Toledo Zoo, managed to keep them alive, as did the Bronx Zoo.

"“No one had kept anything in that genus in captivity,” Dr. Pramuk said. “It was very difficult for us to figure out what they needed.”

"The crucial factors, not surprisingly, turned out to be water, light and food — very carefully prepared water, light and food."

"...a zookeeper in the Bronx, produced a safe food supply by breeding tiny bugs like fruit flies, wood lice and weevils in plastic shoeboxes and other containers filled with cocoa matting, beans and alder leaves that she gathers on the zoo grounds."

[NY Times - Science]