CHAFFEE COUNTY — Number 146227157A struggled and chirped, clearly unhappy about being plucked from the bushes to be swabbed and scanned.
This mountain beaver pond, below Cottonwood Pass in Chaffee County, is the last stronghold for its kind in Colorado, the only place where the boreal toad has what is considered a viable population.
The Colorado Division of Wildlife is concerned enough about the future of the species that experts implanted a microchip in the toad’s back to track its health and movements.
“He’s a natural part of our environment, and we don’t want to lose him in this state,” DOW aquatic/herptile coordinator Tina Jackson said Friday, cradling the toad in her latex-gloved hands.
But we are losing them. Over the past 30 years, boreal toads have disappeared from 90 percent of breeding sites in Colorado, victims of an imported parasitic fungus that has devastated amphibian populations worldwide.
The federal government has refused to list the boreal toad as an endangered species, saying it is genetically the same as a toad found throughout the West. Jackson and some other experts disagree, and the DOW has spent 16 years trying to help the toad recover.
The results have been discouraging. Reintroduction at 20 sites in the state have failed to produce breeding adults, and scientists still barely understand the chytrid fungus that is wiping the toads out, except that it spreads easily with human activity.
“One muddy tire is all it takes to bring chytrid into this drainage, and then we lose this population,” Jackson said.
This could be the boreal toads’ last stronghold in Colorado.
Experts believe the fungus began spreading in the 1930s with the global trade of a South African frog used in early pregnancy tests.
A pregnant woman’s urine, scientists learned, stimulated ovulation in the frogs. After receiving their pregnancy news, many people simply let the frogs go, and the chytrid fungus was carried into the wild.
The 4-inch-long boreal toads were once found in all of Colorado’s mountain ranges, usually near shallow lakes and beaver ponds between 8,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation. But by the mid-’70s, scientists were seeing them disappear from sites and not returning.
