THE GOLDEN TOAD: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species, brothers on a mission to do good for Toadkind

THE GOLDEN TOAD: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species
TREVOR RITLAND & KYLE RITLAND
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and a vanished species: with support from Re:wild campaign, twin brothers follow their father’s footsteps into the heart of the modern extinction crisis.

As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slideshows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain—alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: Could the golden toad still be alive?

In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists—including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive—Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer. Their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, finally intertwining at the site of the golden toad’s last emergence deep in Monteverde’s Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.

The toad’s demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crises, but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If a conversation ever needed changing towards hope in dark times, it's the one around the worldwide amphibian extinction. In point of fact there aren't too many subjects that we do not need to find ways of discussing that include hope, hopefulness at the minimum.

The Ritland siblings found a way to do that. They have not found any surviving populations of the golden toad, but they have contributed a lot to the information store about the fungal enemy of amphibiankind that is globally decimating the world's population of all amphibians.

A family inheritance of curiosity and wanderlust, plus a strong grounding in biology and science more generally, sent this pair to a global biodiversity hotspot, Costa Rica, to do anything they can for the decades-missing golden toad. I know the story here is factual but it reads like a fictional adventure. The men are the kind of competent and driven people that make compelling reading; they are traveling in a landscape so replete with unique life as to be alien to sedentary US readers; and they encounter so many people intent on their own business who either help the men in their quest *because* of the quest, or in spite of it, or try to influence them away from their golden-toad search. It's a bit, well, repetitious at times. I don't think that's surprising at all. There is a great deal of information important to understanding the way things need to unfold to accomplish the needed tasks. It naturally will require periodic refreshers of facts readers most likely won't have fresh in their minds.

Still takes time and energy out of what was from the start a very propulsive narrative style, so I can't honestly award a fifth star to the reading experience. As a story told, it gets all five stars, however, so that explains the compromise half-star I polished up for the Ritlands.

Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis is a terrible, fatal scourge, one unleashed in its scope of havoc-wreaking by our changing climate. Anyone who contributes to the knowledge base regarding it, its impacts, and ultimately the ways and means of its future control or eradication, should be celebrated and praised. The Ritlands are large figures in this world-wide effort. Please help celebrate their passion and their contribution. Get a copy, give a copy, read a copy. It's definitely not time wasted.