‘A really big deal.’ Endangered species discovered reproducing in Colorado wilderness

A biologist made a “potentially game-changing discovery” for the future of a Colorado endangered species — almost a decade into reintroduction efforts.

Daniel Cammack, a native aquatic species biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Southwest Region, treks up to wetlands at 11,500 feet of elevation each year to check on populations of the state’s endangered boreal toads , officials said in a news release.

This year, he found something special in the flooded grasses at the translocation site: hundreds of wild tadpoles.

He’s scouted “much of southwest Colorado in search of wild boreal toad populations or suitable translocation sites” and called the discovery “a monumental day in his career.”

“It’s a really big deal,” he said in a news release.

Cammack filmed a short video documenting the discovery, which the agency shared on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“We’re pretty dang excited about this news !” the agency said in the Aug. 14 post. “The discovery of naturally reproducing boreal toads (evidenced by tadpoles!) at a reintroduction site above Pitkin is big news for this state endangered species.”

The town is about a 200-mile drive southwest from Denver.

Cammack pointed out a small pocket in the flooded grasses containing dozens of tadpoles in the video.

“There’s a little pocket of tadpoles, probably about 20 or 30 right here but throughout all this grass, this flooded area, we’re estimating probably 4- or 500 tadpoles,” he said in the video. “So, we’ll keep an eye on ‘em, and hopefully these will morph into toadlets late this summer.”

If that happens, it will be the second translocation site where the toads have naturally reproduced in Colorado since the agency started reintroducing the species in 2018, officials said. The first site was near Cameron Pass in northern Colorado, about a 280-mile drive north from Pitkin.

A photo shows one of the tiny tadpoles, no bigger than the tip of Cammack’s thumb.

Part of what makes the discovery so significant is that the toads don’t start reproducing until age 6, Cammack said. The agency started reintroducing the toads at the site near Pitkin in 2018.

“It’s a pretty special day,” he said in the video. “This is a culmination of a lot of different people’s efforts and we’ve been waiting for a long time….This is the first year we’ve actually seen natural breeding occurring in this wetland.”

The toads were once common in montane habitats — meaning ecosystems on mountain slopes — between 7,000 and 12,000 feet in the southern Rocky Mountains, but populations declined dramatically over the past two decades, mostly due to habitat loss and infection by chytrid fungus, officials said. The fungus “can infect most of the world’s 7,000 amphibian species, and is linked to major population declines and extinctions globally.”

Colorado Parks and Wildlife identified the site as a good potential habitat to translocate the species in 2013, officials said. The agency stocked the first 600 boreal toads at the site in 2017 to be used as sentinels for chytrid fungus.

The agency has been stocking about 20,000 tadpoles at the site since then, officials said. The vast majority came from eggs biologists collected from wild populations in remote backcountry areas and then transported to a native aquatic species restoration facility.

Another 570 tadpoles raised at the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance were stocked at the site in 2022, officials said.

Cammack is confident the site will continue to foster new wild toads in the future.

“The boreal toad is a truly unique and resilient amphibian,” he said. “We are up at 11,500 feet, at timberline practically. They gut out big winters covered by multiple feet of snow and experience only three to four months of warm growing season…. They are an integral part of the landscape, as far as I’m concerned….For us to get something else going here is really important.”

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