'I wasn't contributing anything to saving our beautiful planet': from consumer magazine editor to frog conservationist

No longer happy working in media and advertising, Mea Trenor gave it all up to go back to school for zoology. Now she's racing to save an endangered frog from extinction - if only she can find it first.

Last December, Mea Trenor found herself at dusk in South Africa's Natal highlands picking through undergrowth desperately trying to find a frog. Not just any frog, but a cryptic, endangered amphibian that pretty much no one has ever heard of: the mistbelt chirping frog. Trenor, and her team of "froggers," had located the frog's general location by listening for its telltale song, but now they had to find a lone male no bigger than a fingernail in the fading light.

"We knew the frog was right there, within the square meter in front of us," Trenor wrote in a blog for the the Zoological Society of London's (ZSL) EDGE programme, which is funding her work. "Yet it took three experienced froggers almost 20 minutes' of triangulation, on our knees, digging through pine needles and grass to finally see it. It was a beautiful moment."