In 2009, a team of biologists in Bolivia brought into captivity a single male Sehuencas Water Frog (Telmatobius yuracare), Romeo, with the hopes of creating a conservation breeding program for the traditionally common species ahead of the kinds of population crashes they were seeing with other frogs. For more than 10 years, however, biologists couldn’t find any other frogs and Romeo lived alone in an aquarium at the Alcide d’Orbigny Natural History Museum in Bolivia—until he got his own Match.com dating profile.
In February of 2018, GWC partnered with the museum and Match, the world’s largest relationship company, to find Romeo a date and save his species from extinction. With Romeo’s Match.com partnership, GWC and the museum were able to raise $25,000 to send an expedition team into Bolivia’s wilderness in search of a Juliet.
And they were successful! In January of 2019, the team rediscovered the Sehuencas Water Frog in the wild, including a Juliet for Romeo, and four other frogs. Juliet now lives with Romeo in an aquarium at the museum’s K’ayra Center, and the celebrity couple and the other individual Sehuencas Frogs are the founders of a conservation breeding program to conserve the species. Someday we hope to be able to return Romeo and Juliet’s progeny to the wild—giving them a much happier ending than their Shakespearean namesake.
Top photo: Romeo and Juliet’s First Date by Robin Moore, GWC
The Sehuencas Water Frog is previously known from fewer than 10 locations, but was once found in abundance as tadpoles on the bottom of small streams of the montane cloud forest or the Bolivian Yungas forest. Researchers suspect that the combination of the deadly amphibian pathogen chytrid, the introduction of trout, habitat loss, pollution and climate change have resulted in precipitous declines in water frog species in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, and are suspected in the decline of the Sehuencas Water Frog.
Ultimately the Sehuencas Water Frog project aims to save this species from extinction through a conservation breeding program and habitat protection. If natural breeding fails, the project may have to turn to emerging artificial reproductive technologies.
The project’s goals include:
Purchase a new dedicated container for Romeo, Juliet and their friends at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny.
Help deck out rooms (aka aquariums) for the whole neighborhood, complete with air conditioners, water filtration systems and more.
Nursery for tadpoles to grow and thrive.
Support the loving couple by giving them romantic worm dinners every night by candlelight.
Hiring staff to help take care of Romeo & Juliet’s future tadpoles. It takes a village!
Prepare streams in the Bolivian cloud forest for the return of Romeo’s future generations to the wild.
