‘The ghost that haunts Monteverde’: how the climate crisis killed the golden toad

The loss of the amphibian from Costa Rica's cloud forest was one of the first linked to global heating, say scientists

Deep in Costa Rica's mist-shrouded cloud forest, hundreds of bright golden toads would appear suddenly each April to mate. It was a spectacular sight for those who witnessed it: the dazzling, mostly subterranean amphibians gathered en masse around pools of rainwater and fought aggressively for the right to copulate with the females before heading back underground.

It was one of the truly great wildlife spectacles of the American tropics," says ecologist Alan Pounds, resident scientist at the Tropical Science Center's Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve, standing at the centre of the toads' former habitat. It somehow looked unreal."