The stunning monochrome starry night harlequin toad, which was considered to have disappeared from the face of the Earth, was found again after almost 30 years in the mountain forests of Colombia.
The rarest toad ‘Atelopus arsyecue’ from the Harlequin family, famous for its various bright colors, received its romantic nickname for its black and white spotted color. The first six specimens of a new species were discovered, photographed and described by scientists back in 1991, and then for almost 30 years no one managed to find the creature. The only evidence that the star harlequins had not yet completely died out was an amateur photograph taken in 2009.
Finding and exploring these rarest amphibians was not an easy task - biologists could not access its small habitat on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range at altitudes of about 2000–3500 meters above sea level in Colombia. For many years, the indigenous people from the Arhuaco tribe prevented the appearance on these lands, considered sacred, of any strangers, even for scientific purposes.
However, some researchers were able to detect a population of 30 individuals. It turned out that all these years Aborigines continued to live in harmony with the surrounding nature, protecting the unique mountain habitat of these unusual amphibians from the anthropogenic impact.
Lina Valencia of the Global Wildlife Conservation which funded the expedition emphasized that “indigenous and local communities can help us not just find species lost to science, but better understand how some species are surviving and how we can conserve the natural world in a way that connects spiritual and cultural knowledge.'”
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, out of 96 known species of harlequin toads, 80 are endangered or have already become extinct in the wild. The causes of their plight vary from climate change to habitat destruction, infectious disease, and crowding out by invasive species.
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