AFP

Those lucky enough to have seen them will never forget.

For just a few days every year, the elfin cloud forest of Costa Rica came alive with crowds of golden toads the length of a child’s thumb, emerging from the undergrowth to mate at rain-swelled pools.  

In this mysterious woodland the cloud drapes over mountain ridges and “the trees are dwarfed and wind-sculpted, gnarled and heavily laden with mosses,” said J Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica.

“The soils are very dark and so golden toads would stand out like animal figurines. It was quite a spectacle.” 

Then in 1990, they were gone. 

The golden toad was the first species where climate change has been identified as a key driver of extinction.

Its fate could be just the beginning. 

For years, researchers have warned that the world is facing both a climate and a biodiversity crisis. Increasingly they say they are connected.

– One in 10 face extinction –

Even if warming is capped at the ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nearly one in 10 of all species face an extinction threat.

The golden toad was only found in Monteverde’s highland forest. So when trouble hit, the species was completely wiped out. 

“It was pretty clear about 99 percent of the population declined within a single year,” said Pounds, whose research into the disappearance of the golden toad was cited in the IPCC’s February report on climate impacts. 

Climate change was barely on the research radar when Pounds first arrived in Costa Rica in the early 1980s to study amphibians.

But global warming was already beginning to take its toll. 

After the disappearance of the golden toad, the Monteverde harlequin frog and others, researchers compared datasets on temperature and weather patterns with those on local species. 

They found not only the signature of the periodic El Nino weather phenomenon, but also trends linked to changes in climate.  

– Climate ‘trigger’ – 

The die-offs occurred after unusually warm and dry periods.

Pounds and his colleagues linked the declines to chytridiomycosis infection, but concluded that disease was only the “bullet — climate change was pulling the trigger.

“We hypothesised that climate change and resultant extreme events were somehow loading the dice for these kinds of outbreaks,” Pounds told AFP.

It was not an isolated incident. 

The expansion of the chytrid fungus globally, along with local climate change “is implicated in the extinction of a wide range of tropical amphibians,” according to the IPCC. 

The fingerprints of global warming have since been seen in other disappearances. 

The Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent living on a low-lying island in the Torres Strait, was last seen in 2009.  

The only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef, its populations were battered by sea-level rise, increased storm surges and tropical cyclones — all made worse by climate change.

Vegetation that provided its food plummeted from 11 plant species in 1998 to just two in 2014. It was recently declared extinct. 

Today, climate change is listed as a direct threat to 11,475 species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Around 5,775 are at risk of extinction.

– #MeToo for species –

The main reason why climate change is increasingly cited as a threat to so many species is that its impacts are becoming more obvious, said Wendy Foden, the head of the IUCN’s climate change specialist group.

But there is also a growing understanding of the enormous variety of effects. 

Beyond extreme weather, warming can also cause species to move, change behaviour or even skew to having more male or female offspring. 

And that’s on top of other human threats like poaching, deforestation, overfishing and pollution. 

In 2019, a report by UN biodiversity report experts said one million species could disappear in the coming decades, raising fears that the world is entering a sixth era of mass extinction.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” said Foden, adding that warnings of catastrophic biodiversity loss have often been overlooked.  

“We need a #MeToo movement for species, a whole wake up on what we are doing.” 

Almost 200 countries are currently locked in global biodiversity talks to try to safeguard nature, including a key milestone of 30 percent of Earth’s surface protected by 2030.

But Foden said the threat of climate change means that the response will have to go beyond traditional conservation. 

“That can’t happen anymore, even in the most remote wilderness, climate change will affect it,” Foden said. 

In some cases, people will need to choose which species to save. 

Take the endangered African penguin in South Africa, which Foden wrote about for the IPCC report on climate impacts. 

Forced to nest in the open after humans mined their guano nesting sites, the adults now have to swim ever further to find fish, likely because of a combination of overfishing and climate change. Meanwhile, the chicks in exposed nests can die from heat stress. 

“We are down to the last 7,000 breeding pairs. At this point, every penguin counts,” Foden said. 

– Cloudless forest –

In Monteverde, even the clouds have changed.  

While rainfall has increased somewhat over the past 50 years, Pounds said it has become much more variable.  

In the 1970,s the forest saw around 25 dry days a year on average — in the last decade it has been more like 115.  

The mist that used to keep the forest wet during the dry season has reduced by around 70 percent.

Pounds said sometimes tourists in the area stop him and ask directions to the Cloud Forest. 

“And I say: ‘You’re in it,'” he said.

“It often feels more like a dust forest than a cloud forest.”

Researchers have also seen steep declines in frogs, snakes and lizards and changes in the bird populations. Some have moved uphill to cooler areas, others have vanished from the area completely.

As for the golden toad, last year a team from the Monteverde Conservation League, supported by the conservation group Re:wild, launched an expedition to look for the golden toad in its historic habitat in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, after tantalising rumours of sightings. 

But in vain.

Meanwhile, Pounds and his colleagues continue to keep an eye out for the golden toad during the rainy season. 

“We haven’t completely given up,” he said. 

“But with each passing year, it looks less likely that they’re going to reappear.”

The death toll from landslides and floods in the Philippines rose to 67 on Wednesday with scores missing and feared dead, officials said, as rescuers dug up more bodies with bare hands and backhoes in crushed villages.

Most of the deaths from tropical storm Megi — the strongest to hit the archipelago this year — were in the central province of Leyte, where a series of landslides devastated communities.

Thirteen people died and around 150 were missing in the coastal village of Pilar, which is part of Abuyog municipality, after a torrent of mud and earth pushed houses into the sea and buried most of the settlement, Abuyog Mayor Lemuel Traya said.

“I have to be honest, we are no longer expecting survivors,” Traya told AFP, adding that emergency personnel were now focused on the difficult task of retrieving bodies.

About 250 people were in evacuation centres after being rescued by boat after roads were cut by landslides, he said. 

A number of villagers were also in hospital.

A rumbling sound like “a helicopter” alerted Ara Mae Canuto, 22, to the landslide hurtling towards her family’s home in Pilar. 

She said she tried to outrun it, but was swept into the water and nearly drowned. 

“I swallowed dirt, and my ears and nose are full of mud,” Canuto told AFP by telephone from her hospital bed. Her father died and her mother has not been found.

Disaster-prone Philippines is regularly ravaged by storms — including a direct hit from Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 — with scientists warning they are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of human-driven climate change.

Baybay City is also reeling after waves of sodden soil smashed into farming settlements over the weekend, killing at least 48 people and injuring over 100, local authorities said. Twenty-seven are still missing, they added. 

Aerial photos showed a wide stretch of mud that had swept down a hill of coconut trees and engulfed Bunga village, where only a few rooftops poked through the now-transformed landscape.

“We were told to be on alert because a storm was coming, but they did not directly tell us we needed to evacuate,” said Bunga farmworker Loderica Portarcos, 47, who lost 17 relatives and a friend in the landslide.

Portarcos braved heat and humidity as she advised a backhoe operator where to dig for three bodies still embedded in the soft soil which had started to smell of rotting flesh.

“Our dead relatives are all in the morgue, but there will be no time for a wake to mourn them because the mayor told us they smell bad,” she said.

– ‘Many of us died’ – 

Three people were also killed in the central province of Negros Oriental and three on the main southern island of Mindanao, according to the national disaster agency.

The death toll from Megi is expected to rise as rescue operations switch to recovering bodies. 

Abuyog police chief Captain James Mark Ruiz said more boats were needed for victims in Pilar. But getting access to the shore was difficult.

Photos posted by the Bureau of Fire Protection on Facebook showed buildings crushed or turned over by the force of the landslide and debris in the water.

“We’re using fiber glass boats and there are steel bars exposed in the sea so it’s very difficult,” Abuyog Mayor Traya said, adding that the ground was unstable and “very risky”.

While Pilar survivor Canuto counts herself lucky to be alive, she said “many of us died and a lot are missing too”.

Whipping up seas, Megi forced dozens of ports to temporarily suspend operations, stranding thousands of people at the start of Holy Week, one of the busiest travel periods of the year in the Philippines.

It came four months after super typhoon Rai devastated swathes of the country, killing more than 400 and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

The Philippines — ranked among the most vulnerable nations to the impacts of climate change — is hit by an average of 20 storms every year.

The hospital room is air-cooled to feel like a pangolin’s burrow. The patient, Lumbi, is syringe-fed with a protein-packed smoothie, given a daily dose of medicine and has his vital signs checked.

Lumbi is being treated for a blood parasite after he was rescued from traffickers during a police sting in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province late last year.

He and several other pangolins in the room are patients of Johannesburg Wildlife Veterinary Hospital, founded in 2016 to treat and rehabilitate indigenous wildlife.

They were confiscated from poachers in South Africa and neighbouring countries, including Namibia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Many pangolins are in a horrendous state when they are rescued and need of medical care, after being kept in sacks and car boots for weeks with no food or water.

“It’s like an ICU (intensive care unit) for pangolins,” said Nicci Wright, the wildlife rehabilitation specialist attending to Lumbi.

The pangolins are kept at a secret site during treatment, which takes anything from weeks to months, before they can be released back into the wild.

Although pangolins have existed for around 80 million years, medically little is known about them. 

– Pangolins ‘are like people’ –

“They are so different to other animals. They really are,” said Wright, who has been working with pangolins since 2008.

Sometimes vets have to fiddle with various treatment regimes to provide the appropriate medication.

“The actual veterinary medicine and rehabilitation process hasn’t been well documented and very little is actually know about the African species,” said Wright. 

Vets administer standard treatments used on other mammals such as cats and dogs. Often they work.

“Sometimes to you just have to take a chance, and so far we have taken chances and we have been very successful and they have responded very well,” said vet Kelsey Skinner.

“It’s just a leap of faith every time you try something,” said Skinner, 30, after giving Lumbi his daily dose of meds.

Having cared for sick pangolins for several years, Skinner discovered that, like people, they have different personalities.

The scaly-skinned, insect-eating mammals are solitary, nocturnal animals.

“They are like people. They have just the most unique little personalities. 

“Some of them are shy. They don’t want to be touched. Others are very out there and play a lot in the mud. They are comedians,” she said.

“The level of personalities is like dealing with a whole lot of different people. Everyone is just so unique.”

– The most trafficked mammals –

Pangolins are believed to be the most trafficked mammals on earth. They’re prized for their scales — made of keratin, like human nails — which are used in Asia for their supposed medicinal properties.

Only found in the wild in Asia and Africa, their numbers are plummeting under pressure from poaching. Some species are listed by wildlife watchdogs as critically endangered.

It’s not known how many pangolins are left on the planet. 

The ward that now cares for Lumbi was also home, until recently, to a pangolin named Steve. Last month, Steve was released back into the wild, where he belongs, after making a full recovery.

Gareth Thomas is a volunteer pangolin walker who walked Steve weekly during the seven months of preparation for his release. 

“I’ve been with him since day one. I was there when he got pulled out of the box from the poachers,” he said during one of their final walks before the release.

After a six-hour drive, Steve was set free into the vast 23,000-hectare Manyoni Game Reserve in southern KwaZulu-Natal province.

Pangolin monitor Donald Davies from Zululand Conservation Trust offloaded a specially designed crate from the van, with Steve inside and opened it.

With two telemetry devices attached to his scales, the pangolin cautiously stepped out, sniffing around and casually walking away to find ants for an afternoon grub.

“He has all the skills he needs to survive in the wild now,” said Davies.

Freeing them into the wild is a crucial process to ensure the endangered mammals survive after the huge investment poured into their treatment and rehabilitation.

“The release process is one of the most important, because it has to be done correctly,” said Wright.  

The gentle creatures can only be released into a relatively safe area, such as a well-patrolled private game reserve, to avoid them falling into the poachers’ clutches again.

And, in addition, the habitat has to be right. “We need to be absolutely sure they are finding the right food, they are finding the burrows. Otherwise they will simply die”.

Those lucky enough to have seen them will never forget.

For just a few days every year, the elfin cloud forest of Costa Rica came alive with crowds of golden toads the length of a child’s thumb, emerging from the undergrowth to mate at rain-swelled pools.  

In this mysterious woodland the cloud drapes over mountain ridges and “the trees are dwarfed and wind-sculpted, gnarled and heavily laden with mosses,” said J Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica.

“The soils are very dark and so golden toads would stand out like animal figurines. It was quite a spectacle.” 

Then in 1990, they were gone. 

The golden toad was the first species where climate change has been identified as a key driver of extinction.

Its fate could be just the beginning. 

For years, researchers have warned that the world is facing both a climate and a biodiversity crisis. Increasingly they say they are connected.

– One in 10 face extinction –

Even if warming is capped at the ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nearly one in 10 of all species face an extinction threat.

The golden toad was only found in Monteverde’s highland forest. So when trouble hit, the species was completely wiped out. 

“It was pretty clear about 99 percent of the population declined within a single year,” said Pounds, whose research into the disappearance of the golden toad was cited in the IPCC’s February report on climate impacts. 

Climate change was barely on the research radar when Pounds first arrived in Costa Rica in the early 1980s to study amphibians.

But global warming was already beginning to take its toll. 

After the disappearance of the golden toad, the Monteverde harlequin frog and others, researchers compared datasets on temperature and weather patterns with those on local species. 

They found not only the signature of the periodic El Nino weather phenomenon, but also trends linked to changes in climate.  

– Climate ‘trigger’ – 

The die-offs occurred after unusually warm and dry periods.

Pounds and his colleagues linked the declines to chytridiomycosis infection, but concluded that disease was only the “bullet — climate change was pulling the trigger.

“We hypothesised that climate change and resultant extreme events were somehow loading the dice for these kinds of outbreaks,” Pounds told AFP.

It was not an isolated incident. 

The expansion of the chytrid fungus globally, along with local climate change “is implicated in the extinction of a wide range of tropical amphibians,” according to the IPCC. 

The fingerprints of global warming have since been seen in other disappearances. 

The Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent living on a low-lying island in the Torres Strait, was last seen in 2009.  

The only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier Reef, its populations were battered by sea-level rise, increased storm surges and tropical cyclones — all made worse by climate change.

Vegetation that provided its food plummeted from 11 plant species in 1998 to just two in 2014. It was recently declared extinct. 

Today, climate change is listed as a direct threat to 11,475 species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Around 5,775 are at risk of extinction.

– #MeToo for species –

The main reason why climate change is increasingly cited as a threat to so many species is that its impacts are becoming more obvious, said Wendy Foden, the head of the IUCN’s climate change specialist group.

But there is also a growing understanding of the enormous variety of effects. 

Beyond extreme weather, warming can also cause species to move, change behaviour or even skew to having more male or female offspring. 

And that’s on top of other human threats like poaching, deforestation, overfishing and pollution. 

In 2019, a report by UN biodiversity report experts said one million species could disappear in the coming decades, raising fears that the world is entering a sixth era of mass extinction.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” said Foden, adding that warnings of catastrophic biodiversity loss have often been overlooked.  

“We need a #MeToo movement for species, a whole wake up on what we are doing.” 

Almost 200 countries are currently locked in global biodiversity talks to try to safeguard nature, including a key milestone of 30 percent of Earth’s surface protected by 2030.

But Foden said the threat of climate change means that the response will have to go beyond traditional conservation. 

“That can’t happen anymore, even in the most remote wilderness, climate change will affect it,” Foden said. 

In some cases, people will need to choose which species to save. 

Take the endangered African penguin in South Africa, which Foden wrote about for the IPCC report on climate impacts. 

Forced to nest in the open after humans mined their guano nesting sites, the adults now have to swim ever further to find fish, likely because of a combination of overfishing and climate change. Meanwhile, the chicks in exposed nests can die from heat stress. 

“We are down to the last 7,000 breeding pairs. At this point, every penguin counts,” Foden said. 

– Cloudless forest –

In Monteverde, even the clouds have changed.  

While rainfall has increased somewhat over the past 50 years, Pounds said it has become much more variable.  

In the 1970,s the forest saw around 25 dry days a year on average — in the last decade it has been more like 115.  

The mist that used to keep the forest wet during the dry season has reduced by around 70 percent.

Pounds said sometimes tourists in the area stop him and ask directions to the Cloud Forest. 

“And I say: ‘You’re in it,'” he said.

“It often feels more like a dust forest than a cloud forest.”

Researchers have also seen steep declines in frogs, snakes and lizards and changes in the bird populations. Some have moved uphill to cooler areas, others have vanished from the area completely.

As for the golden toad, last year a team from the Monteverde Conservation League, supported by the conservation group Re:wild, launched an expedition to look for the golden toad in its historic habitat in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, after tantalising rumours of sightings. 

But in vain.

Meanwhile, Pounds and his colleagues continue to keep an eye out for the golden toad during the rainy season. 

“We haven’t completely given up,” he said. 

“But with each passing year, it looks less likely that they’re going to reappear.”