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Yvonne Losano-Ortega is at his house in Bogota, Colombia, and he's getting ready to go to sleep when he gets a call. We are calling from the Bogota International Airport. I'm with the police, and we just found a bag full of frogs. A bag full of frogs.
I said, okay. The reason they called Yvonne is that Yvonne was in charge of Bogota's Wildlife Rescue Center. It was like this exotic animal orphanage where people would send animals that somebody, for some reason, had taken out of the wild. We were used to receive a monkey, a parrot, and a turtle today.
Yeah, they'd get turtles, monkeys. One time they even got a bear. And they were kind of like, uh, okay, yeah, sure, we can handle a bear. You can feed a bear.
I mean, it's easy to feed a bear. But they weren't prepared, apparently, for frogs. And it was a lot of frogs. The police told them there were like 400.
And I was like, what? 400? What kind of frogs? They said, oh, those ones that are really nice and good-looking, that have very bright colors and stuff like that.
And I was like, oh, my God, those are poison frogs. What am I going to do with that? Most of them were a type of frog called Ufaga Lamani. They're bright red and black.
They kind of look like they're permanently wet and, yeah, poisonous. So it was like mind-blowing. We were not really expecting that. Did you say, no, we can't do that?
Like, what did you say? No, I just thought to myself. At that time, we were young. And these challenges were enriching.
You know, and we were like, it's going to hurt. We are going to do our best. Yvonne tells the police, meet me at the rescue center, bring the frogs. I'll be right there.
And the first thing Yvonne has to do is he's got to make these frogs comfortable. And the frogs, they're really particular. They like it hot and they like it wet. So we had to flood one of the offices, put a lot of water on the floor.
Do you flood it off? We had to flood it. Close all doors, put a heater, and raise the temperature and raise the humidity to 90%. Sounds cozy.
The staff has to work outside under a tent. They're using makeshift butterfly nets to catch bugs in the park to feed the frogs. But the frogs are really picky, and they keep rejecting their park bugs because they don't like park bugs. They like rainforest bugs.
At one point, one of the frogs breaks loose, and Yvonne picks up with his bare hand without thinking. And then his finger starts to swell up from the poison. It was strange because you never see veins on a finger. Did you call a doctor?
No, I didn't have time for that. It was a 24-hour kind of job at that time. And the clock was ticking. The frogs were dying.
Yvonne says they were dying like flies. And there are not a lot of these frogs in the wild. They are critically endangered. And now Yvonne was responsible for a whole bunch of them.
It's a huge responsibility. It's like you've got a box of panda bears, and these frogs are dying on your hands. A few weeks later, Yvonne gets another call from the airport. There's another 300 frogs here.
Then another call. More frogs. And we were like, what is going on? Somebody is deploring the Colombian forest of these frogs.
This is an nightmare. This is something that is going to make the species become extinct. Something has to be done. Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Sarah Gonzalez. And I'm Stan Alcorn. I've been reporting in Colombia, where these poisonous frogs have been getting poached and smuggled out of the country. Today on the show, Yvonne has a plan to outsmart the smugglers.
He wants to flood the frog market and drive the smugglers out of business. And to see how that plan is going, we hike to the one tiny spot in the world where these special frogs live, deep in the Colombian rainforest. NPR's newest podcast is where you can find NPR's biggest interviews. I'm Steve Inskey.
The program is called Newsmakers. We talk to some of the most powerful and influential people at this moment to put real questions to them and push for real answers. Follow Newsmakers on the NPR app or any podcast player, or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel. When Yvonne was a kid, he dreamed of running a zoo.
He spent hours just flipping through pages of a wildlife encyclopedia. He never picked just one favorite animal. When he grew up and started working in animal conservation, he decided that his favorite animals would be all of the endangered ones. In the beginning, I wanted to protect all the animals, but that was impossible.
I didn't have the money to work with something like a big black jaguar or a deer or something like that. Not even a bird. But after he got that bag full of smuggled frogs from the airport, the Ufaga-Lamani frogs, something clicked. These cute little red and black strike frogs, they were small, they were manageable, they were in his country, in Colombia.
Yvonne thinks, maybe this is a species I could save from extinction. I wanted to do something during my lifetime, not just starting something that somebody else could finish. Now, to actually save this animal, Yvonne would have to take on the smugglers. Yeah, people were ripping these frogs from the forest and smuggling them out of Colombia through the Bogota airport to sell them to people overseas, to people who love these frogs so much of them as pets.
Like, you know how there are cat people and snake people? Well, there are frog people, and they call themselves froggers. And among the froggers, Yvonne's frog, the Ufaga-Lamani, has become particularly treasured. In this box right here is quite literally gold.
How is that possible? It's just a cardboard box. No, no. This is a video of a guy unboxing Ufaga-Lamani frogs.
This is $65,000 worth of frogs from Colombia. To be clear, the frogs in the video were not smuggled. Generally, people who buy smuggled goods don't brag about it on YouTube, but that is what was happening to the Ufaga-Lamani. And to understand how this little creature became something that froggers were breaking the law to own, I wanted to travel up the smuggled frog supply chain, up a rough dirt road along the Anchecaya River, to the only place in the world where this frog lives.
A few square miles of rainforest in the middle of the Andes Mountains in Colombia. It's super remote, no phone service, just like 10 houses nearby. And to find one of these frogs, I need to follow a stream deep into the jungle. So I went with an expert, a local guy who knows this rainforest.
Her name's Lucelle Lopez. Lucelle says, this is my university. The jungle is really steep. I can barely keep up with her.
Not ideal for hiking. At some points, we're moving just inches at a time. It's like trying to swim through tree branches. We are in the middle of a plant.
We can barely move. Lucelle has to break out her machete. But finally, two and a half hours in, Lucelle hears one of the frogs calling. She says there's one nearby.
And to keep the frog singing, Lucelle does a kind of frog call. We're trying to follow the frog song, but the frog goes quiet, so we try playing a recording of a real Ufaga-Lamani. It sounds kind of like a duck quacking, I guess. And we do hear a faint quacking in response somewhere uphill.
And we try to follow it, but the jungle is too thick to move forward. So after about 15 minutes of unrequited frog calls, we give up on this frog and go deeper into the jungle. It's just constant macheteing. Until just above the stream.
Don't we? Hi! There it is! The frog is just sitting on a branch.
Lucelle's like, Hi, my Lamani, how pretty, my precious baby. I love you. It's like the size of a plum. And its red and black stripes look wet and bright.
And the tips of its toes are white, like it just had its nails done. And even though Lucelle is right up next to it, it doesn't try to escape. It just sits there. These frogs don't worry about predators.
Their bright colors tell predators to stay away, that they're poisonous. Yeah, the colors and friendly disposition that have made them so attractive to pet owners, those are part of an evolutionary strategy that's helped them thrive here in their natural environment for millions of years. This valley used to be filled with the sound of Ufaga Lomani. Up until 50 years ago, when the worst predators arrived, the smugglers.
Carlos Rodriguez-Mera remembers when the smugglers started showing up back then, when he was a kid. Tall guys, he says. Americans and Germans. Offering money to catch 100 frogs, 150 frogs.
And Carlos would do it, because he says he needed to help his family. He'd spend a few days camping under a tarp in the woods, hunting the frogs during the day, the same way we did, on the sea-wet slopes. But if he saw one, he'd grab it. Barehanded, quick, and dump it in a plastic bag.
Carlos says the smugglers could offer him a few dollars per frog. And according to the biologists who study these frogs, smugglers took an estimated 80,000 frogs out of this valley. Today, there are probably less than 5,000 of them left. And Ivan, Ivan, who rescued those frogs from the airport in the 90s, he says that part of what makes these frogs so special is that they are rare.
If you have any kind of good that is rare and difficult to find, difficult to purchase, you will need probably a very high price for that, like a diamond. Like a diamond. So like, the non-endangered, regular, old, cute, small frog went for $30 back in the 90s. This frog was 10 times that, $300.
People kind of only want it because it's hard to get. It's like a fancy bag or limited edition sneakers or something. And they will pay whatever they need to get their hands on one. It is what is called a Veblen good.
With normal goods, like, I don't know, socks or carrots, the demand goes up as the goods get cheaper. But with Veblen goods, like this frog, the high price is actually part of the appeal. So the demand goes up as they get more expensive. The demand is not going to stop.
It's going to stop when the frogs are extinct. And if you can't stop the demand, Ivan starts wondering if he could do something about the supply. Like, what if he could make the diamond of the frog world common? Exactly, because these are not diamonds in the end.
They will breed. Yeah, the frogs will breed. This is the heart of Ivan's big plan to save this tiny animal. So our bet was breeding them in large numbers, flooding the market, decreasing the prices.
So nobody want ever to go to the jungle and poach these animals for the international trade. So you can put the smugways out of business with economics, basically. Exactly. Ivan isn't talking here about breeding frogs to release in the wild, to repopulate the Anchigaya Valley.
He is talking about breeding frogs to sell to frog collectors overseas so that everyone can leave the few remaining Bufagalamani alone. And his goal is to create a supply glut. So many frogs that the price would drop and it just wouldn't be worth poaching or smuggling anymore. That was his idea.
But no one had ever done any of this before. To pull this off, he was going to have to figure out how to breed them, how to get the Colombian government to let him sell them, and then sell so many that he'd drive down the price and out-compete the smugglers. And this is the place where he was going to try to do all that. It's a frog breeding facility, a frog farm, a couple hours outside of Bogota, guarded by a whiny dog named Molly.
Hello, Molly. Welcome. This is it. This is Tesoros de Colombia, the Treasures of Colombia.
That's what he called it. In 2011, Ivan got a batch of Bufagalamani frogs, specifically for the purpose of breeding here. Those airport frogs, they were long gone. But now he needed to keep these new frogs alive.
You know what that is? There's a lot of carrots with labels on it, it looks like. Exactly. Are those for the humans or for the frogs?
No, no, no, no. Those are for the crickets. The carrots are for the crickets, and the crickets are for the frogs. Now, in the wild, these frogs do not necessarily eat just crickets.
Ivan learns that they eat like 80 different types of bugs. And these jungle bugs are actually what make these frogs poisonous. Frogs in captivity, because of their boring captive cricket diet, actually stop being poisonous. Whoa.
Ivan does sprinkle the crickets with different supplements to try to simulate that jungle diet. There is no supplement for poisonousness. But there is one for color, actually. It helps give them that bright, bright shade of red they get in the wild.
Yeah, and the frogs are eating these crickets sprinkled with whatever color-enhancing thing Ivan's got. He's keeping these frogs alive, and nice and bright, how everyone likes them. But these frogs, they were not really laying eggs. These frogs are not like other frogs.
They don't dump a thousand eggs at once. They only lay like four or five eggs at a time. And they don't lay eggs in any old place either. These frogs need to feel comfortable if they're going to make babies.
To breed these frogs, Ivan is learning how to think like a frog. He learns they like to lay their eggs in private, not just out there in the terrarium where everybody can see. So he gives the frogs a little pike where they can sneak in. That's in privacy.
And they start laying eggs. Little eggs will hatch into tadpoles and become real ufagalamani frogs. And the most important part of Ivan's process is actually what he feeds the tadpoles. The tadpoles will eat only eggs for their development.
I'm sorry, they eat eggs? Eggs. Yeah, these tadpoles eat eggs. And not just any eggs.
Basically, they're brothers and sisters. Ufagalamani tadpoles eat ufagalamani eggs. Is that a common thing? Is that just a normal frog behavior?
No, no, that's what makes these species very special because they're not easy to breed in captivity. Because you have to feed them. You have to feed them eggs. You cannot feed them anything else.
Even in the wild, the mom of a frog feeds her tadpoles some of her other eggs. This is part of why this frog is so rare in the wild because they eat their own. Ufaga actually means egg eater. That's the most important part or aspect of this farm.
And that's the secret. That's the secret. It takes him on almost two years, but he finally gets the first batch of frogs to survive. Four little frog babies.
It was stressful. I mean, this was really stressful because it's like, you know, having a human baby. I have two daughters, so I know the feeling. Every day I was worried that they would die.
I was every day when I was not at the farm calling saying, how are they? Are they still alive? And I said, yes. The frog of them, yes.
All four frogs made it to adulthood and then they made babies. Now he needed to try to sell them to get legal permission to sell a critically endangered species. That's controversial. People tried this kind of thing in the past.
It hasn't always worked out so well. Yeah, things kind of backfired when people started doing this with tigers, for example. People started breeding tigers in China, Laos, South Africa for the explicit purpose of killing them to sell their hearts, their skin, their teeth, bones. Now the goal was to have everyone kind of like leave the wild tigers alone, but breeding tigers like this kind of made the problem worse because suddenly authorities had to try to figure out which tiger teeth were farmed and legal and which were wild and illegal.
And with these farmed tiger parts available, it reduced the stigma of owning tiger parts in general, actually increasing demand and endangering even more wild tigers. In Yvonne's case, it was up to the Colombian government to weigh these kinds of arguments and decide whether or not to give them permission. never given anyone this kind of permission before to sell Colombia's endangered frogs. So a year went by, then two, and the frogs, they're just piling up in his lab.
He can't sell a single one. His business partners quit, he's hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and he's losing hope. I was hungry all the time. It was terrible.
Did you think about shutting it down then? How? I mean, I was in a very bad situation economically, mentally, but I had, this is my life for it. You know, you don't abandon your life for it.
Finally, after about three years, the Colombian government gives Ivan permission to sell the first ever legal export of ufag alamani. He ships off 35 frogs in a box headed to New York City. This is what Ivan wanted. People buying lab-made frogs instead of black-market poached jungle frogs.
Everyone was like, you know, shouting and saying, this is incredible. We've made history. This is a new hobby. This is a new way of conservation.
It was crazy. Were you thinking, we did it? Yes. I thought, I said, with this, we're not going to lose these incredible species anymore.
I was really confident. But it is not so easy to outsmart and outcompete the smugglers. And after the break, Ivan's plan to save the ufaga alamani frog might actually endanger other animals. Since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, southern states are redistricting.
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There are lines the Federal Reserve just won't cross. But when the economy is in crisis, those lines get blurry. You know, I don't think we've ever seen a world in which we thought the Fed was going to sort of jump into the corporate bond market. And we certainly haven't seen a world where they were prepared to lend to mainstream businesses.
So it really underlines that during moments of crisis, we've seen them get pretty creative. A deep dive on fear of power. That's in our recent bonus episode. It's available now for Planet Money Plus listeners, whose support helps make this show possible.
When Ivan sold those first 35 lab-bred Ufagalimani frogs, he actually got on a plane and flew to New York City himself to hand-deliver the frogs to the frog buyers. It's a big party. There's champagne, the frogs are there, Ivan, and the frog buyers. Like, Americans and Europeans purchasing frogs.
This is, in a way, the source of the problem. These are the people who... I never thought that they were doing anything wrong. I mean...
You didn't think it was wrong in those early days when you found all the traffic frogs and you find out it's because of people buying them? It was wrong for Colombia, for the species in Colombia. But from their point of view, they were doing nothing wrong. They were just frog lovers that wanted their frogs.
If you are not working with them, this thing is not going to have success. So they must be part of the solution. So my name is Chris Miller, and in my fun life, I breed frogs. Chris Miller is a frog collector in Chicago.
He actually started when he was a kid, and someone randomly gave him a frog. They're like, would you like a frog? And so I'm like, yeah, of course. Like, who doesn't want a frog?
That one frog turned into more than a thousand frogs. He keeps them in his garage, which he calls Frogville. No, he doesn't. Yes, he does.
And 20 years ago, he bought some Ufagalimani. They weren't readily available, but if you knew who to ask, you could get them. Chris bought three Ufagalimani, smuggled out of the Anchicaya Valley in the Colombian rainforest. The price for these smuggled frogs was $300 each.
Not cheap, but actually, it was a lot cheaper than the frogs from Ivan's facility, from Tesoros. When Ivan first started selling frogs, they were going for $1,000 to $2,000 for a single frog. We, in Frogville, as we call it up here, we can't be continuous customers of Tesoros because we just don't have the money to do it. Now, Ivan, the frog breeder, he has been lowering his prices to try to compete with the black market frog rates.
His most recent frog price list says one Ufagalimani goes for $900. Ivan says he's even sold some for $500. But from what we can tell, that's still not cheaper than the smuggled frog prices. It's hard for him to compete because Ivan, he needs to make enough money to run his whole frog farm.
He has to pay employees, legal advisors, government permits. It's quite expensive to run Tesoros. It's almost $20,000 per month. Well, and this seems like one of the huge challenges of competing with the black market and with smugglers, right?
Because the smugglers don't have to pay for lawyers. The smugglers don't have to do paperwork. Would your price need to come all the way down to $200 to totally drive them out of business, make it not make sense? Yeah, sure.
We think that that's a possibility. We're not going to be able to run the facility with those prices. So Ivan's plan to turn the diamond of the frog world into something common and cheap isn't really working. You cannot compete with the smugglers.
You need also a backup. His backup plan? Make people care about these frogs and where they come from. That's how we do get rid of smugglers.
Not just by price, but with education. Yeah, Ivan wants to educate the froggers. Basically convince them that it is not okay to buy a smuggled frog and that it is actually worth it to buy frogs that are farmed ethically, no matter how pricey they might seem. Yeah, it's like fair trade frogs.
And this has kind of worked. Frog collectors like Chris, they were openly buying smuggled frogs or the offspring of smuggled frogs just a couple decades ago. And now it's a lot more taboo. Chris says there's no way he'd do that today.
But there are still people buying smuggled frogs just a few years ago. More turned up at the Bogotai airport. But Ivan still thinks that he can end Ufagalamani frog smuggling by lowering the price of his ethical frogs even more. It's just he'd have to do something a little risky, a little mad scientist-y.
Ivan wants to introduce the frog-buying people to new species of frogs. Frogs that most people have never even heard of and start selling those. Frogs that would feel so rare, so special that he could charge a ton for them. The idea is that he'd make so much money off these fancy new frogs that he could charge way less for the Ufagalamani.
That's the model of the business, exactly. You just keep some good income for species for a while. And then you move to other species. Why?
Because there's demand for other species. So the idea is to increase the amount of species we're working on. He wants to breed and sell wild birds, too. Like this bird called the multicolored tanager.
Ivan's whole model, it's kind of a never-ending cycle, right? Like, to save one animal, you need to keep introducing more and more animals to pet trade. And as I've been reporting on this, I've got to say, I do worry a bit about what will happen to these new species. Like, could they become the new target for smugglers?
But Ivan, he has no doubts. He is sure that this would only be good for them. And so he's moving forward with this plan. He's working on getting a permit to sell these birds and new frogs from the Colombian government.
And he says that if he doesn't get that permit in the next few years, De Soros may have to close. And then Ivan thinks that the smugglers will start taking Ufagalamani from the rainforest more and more again. Until maybe they take the last one. This episode was produced masterfully by Willa Rubin with help from Emma Peasley.
It was edited by Jess Jane, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Josh Newell. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. We want to thank Charlotte de Bourbois, who co-reported the show and hiked into the jungle with me and wrote with us. And special thanks also to Professor M'lady Bettencourt and to our guide in Unchiquilla, Dario Ultima.
I'm Stan Alcorn. And I'm Sarah Gonzalez. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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