Reporter's notebook: A Costa Rica journal
Monitor contributor Moises Velasquez-Manoff set down some on-the-spot observations as he and Monitor photographer Andy Nelson traversed this tiny Latin American country investigating the effects of climate change.
from the June 21, 2007 edition
Page 4 of 4
May 18: Ghosts of a foggy forest
We've come to Costa Rica to report on climate change because of the country's remarkable biodiversity and its notable conservation efforts, and, specifically, because scientists have documented mountain frogs disappearing at an alarming rate here.
Between 1987 and 1988 – a particularly warm year – two amphibians vanished from the forests of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in central Costa Rica.
The golden toad and the Monteverde harlequin frog haven't been seen since. Alan Pounds, scientist-in-residence at Monteverde, calls it the first known extinction due, at least in part, to climate change.
The irony is that we've traveled some 3,000 miles to report on species that no longer exists. We've come to see the hole left by something gone forever.
So in some sense, a visit to Monteverde is like a visit to an old, beautiful, but deserted castle. You can imagine what the inhabitants looked like – how they clustered in the puddles beneath the trees – but it's just an exercise in visualization based on stories from those who were witnesses. The inhabitants themselves are history.
These foggy, dripping heights were the only spot on earth where the golden toad existed. In the tropics, species that evolve on mountaintops are often limited to a single mountain or mountain range. The hot lowlands represent an impenetrable barrier to moving elsewhere.
And when climatic conditions change or disease invades, there are no rafts for them to hop aboard. They can't sail to another mountaintop. Besides, more often than not, the other mountaintops will have their own native species, and these species will have their own problems.
Remove a brick from a wall, and it leaves a hole. Likewise, take a species out of an ecosystem, and there's a gap. The whole structure, which humans inevitably rely on in some form or another, grows weaker, moving ever closer to collapse.
That hasn't happened at Monteverde – yet. But there is much evidence of a system in flux.
Some bird species have moved up the slope from the lowlands. Others, already at the top of their range in terms of temperature, have nowhere else to go, and seem to be growing scarcer. With the disappearance of so many amphibians, Dr. Pounds says he thinks birds may be having a difficult time getting enough protein.
For what it's worth, during the three or four hours we spend at Monteverde, we see nary a lizard or frog.
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