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one Lyman Chafer A frog perches on a branch in its natural habitat in the Anchicaya Valley, Colombia.
Charlotte de Beauvoir/NPR
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one Lyman Chafer A frog perches on a branch in its natural habitat in the Anchicaya Valley, Colombia.
Charlotte de Beauvoir/NPR
Ivan Lozano Ortega was in charge of Bogota’s Wildlife Rescue Center in the 1990s when he began getting calls from the airport asking to get rid of … frogs. Hundreds of brightly colored frogs.
Most of these frogs belong to a species called Lyman ChaferBright red, black and poisonous. Ivan and his colleagues were unprepared. They filled an office with water to make the air humid enough for the frogs to survive. They also made makeshift butterfly nets to catch the insects and feed them.
“It was a 24-hour (day) job,” he said. “The clock was ticking.”
The frog is dying. Lyman Chafer It is already a critically endangered species. But the calls kept coming in, with more and more frogs being found at airports, left behind by smugglers.
“Someone is depleting the frog population in the Colombian forests,” he said. “It’s a nightmare. It’s going to lead to the extinction of this species. We have to do something.”
Ivan stumbled upon the black market for frogs. Lyman Chafer They can fetch hundreds of dollars. They are taken directly from the Colombian rainforest by poachers, smuggled overseas and sold to collectors, also known as “frog collectors.” Frog collectors keep these rare frogs as pets.
Ivan Lozano Ortega stands outside his frog farm laboratory in Tesoros, Colombia.
Stan Alcorn/NPR
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According to research Anoectochilus lehmannii Smugglers have taken about 80,000 frogs Colombia’s Anchicaya Valley is the only place on Earth where this plant can be found. Today, there are probably fewer than 5,000 of them left.
Ivan said one of the reasons the frogs are so special to collectors is that they are rare.
“If you have anything that’s rare and hard to find and hard to buy, it’s likely to cost a lot, like diamonds,” he said.
These rare frogs are called “Veblen goods” – goods whose price goes up, not down. Ivan decides that he can’t eliminate the demand for these rare frogs, but he can do something about the supply.
Today on the show, how will Ivan try to stop Lyman Chafer By breeding and selling these animals legally, he learned that doing things in the real world using textbook economics can have very different results.
This show is hosted by Stan Alcorn and Sarah Gonzalez, with reporting and writing by Charlotte de Beauvoir. Willa Rubin produced this show with help from Emma Peaslee. Jess Jiang edited. Sierra Juarez fact-checked. Josh Newell designed it. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
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