The Golden Toad

The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and the vanished species of the golden toad—Twin documentarians and environmental writers, who have collaborated with Leonardo DiCaprio’s RE:WILD campaign, carry on their father’s mission at the heart of the modern extinction crisis. As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent Golden Toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide in Monteverde, Costa Rica’s cloud forests, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and vanish again beneath the earth. But as the years passed by, the toads’ numbers diminished, with the last of them vanishing without a trace more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors abound—alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive? In The Golden Toad, the Ritlands set off to investigate an environmental mystery with miraculous surprises, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists, including the last person to have seen the golden toad, the Ritlands return to the jungle to hunt for clues in the wild cloud forest. As Trevor searches for the victims, Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths intertwine when they discover that a pandemic of serial killer fungi elevated by changing climate could be the culprit. The toad’s demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crisis but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.