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Frogs farewell spawns curse
Lab life: Frogs await their final fate as fodder for student dissections
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Lab life: Frogs await their final fate as fodder for student dissections.
Back in the early 1980s , a fresh young undergraduate loved wandering through a paddy field that was an integral part of the Malang Teachers' College campus.
On her walks, Dwi Listyorini monitored the crops thriving in the fertile East Java valley that had in the past been dusted with rich volcanic ash.
This is three-harvests-a-year farmland with some of the world's finest soils.
Dwi said that she marvelled at the color transformations of the ripening rice and admired the graceful white herons soaring in to feed in the shallows.
Above all she enjoyed hearing the frogs call after rain.
'I loved their song,' she recalled, 'It was beautiful - a natural thing. They sounded so happy and made me feel happy too.'
Dwi wasn't just a romantic. There's a sharp edge to this smart lady. As a biology student, she needed specimens to dissect, so it was easy to pop a jolly gargling frog into her bag then dissect it on a laboratory bench. One less among the millions wouldn't make a difference.
Then the world slipped into overdrive. Indonesians lusted for higher education and the government eventually responded. The college became Malang State University [UM].
Student Dwi became Dr Al-Jabari after winning a scholarship to study genes at Tokyo Metropolitan University and married a Palestinian computer expert.
On her return, Dwi found new classrooms had sprouted where grains once grew. Ponds had been drained. Parking lots, a tennis court, even a swimming pool had been installed.
Trees she remembered for their grace and shade had disappeared. So had the wandering streams, now disciplined to follow straight lines, by-passing buildings and channelled under roads. The rice bowl had been caked with concrete.
Also gone were the frogs ' or almost all. The 45-hectare campus chorus is now jack hammers and shovels scraping aggregate as UM races to meet the demand for more teaching space. More than 30,000 students are enrolled in eight faculties.
'In 1995, we had seven species of frog on campus,' Dwi. 'In the last survey published in The Journal of Tropical Life Science, my students discovered only three varieties. The others have disappeared through pollution and loss of habitat.
'It seems as though we've been cursed for what we're doing to the environment. Now we have to buy our frogs.'
The biotechnical laboratory that Dwi heads needs about 100 frogs a semester for student dissection. They cost between Rp 10,000 [US 80 cents] to Rp 15,000 [US$1.20] each and they come from the village of Sambigede, about an hour's drive west of Malang.
The shelves of her top floor laboratory glisten with jars of partly dissected amphibians, their pop eyes peering blindly through a soup of preservatives at the sterile world of science, webbed fingers clawing the glass.
'Indonesia is rich in frogs,' said Dwi, who also lectures on vertebrate biodiversity and conservation. 'Although there are only 42 species in Java there are more than 400 others across the archipelago.'
That sounds significant, but world-wide there are twelve times as many ' some authorities claim the ratio is 15 times more. This year, the discovery in Sulawesi by an international research team of a previously unknown fanged frog was announced.
The find has excited natural science because this species gives birth to live young, by-passing the egg-laying favored by its relatives.
'Frogs are good indicator species of the health of the environment. Their skins are moist and permeable so they are sensitive to pollutants,' said Dwi.
'There are stories of developmental abnormalities among tadpoles exposed to chemicals. Around the globe there have been reports of declining numbers.
'Few children respect frogs and boys like kicking them. They think they're slimy and disgusting. There's a belief that frog urine is poisonous. Indonesian culture doesn't have the relationship with frogs that's found in the West, as in nursery rhymes and Kermit.'
Kermit the Frog was the most famous of the late American television puppeteer Jim Henson's Muppet creations, first appearing in 1955 and still internationally popular.
His song, 'It's not easy being green' has become an anthem for conservationists.
Dwi's suggestions for campus development include fewer single-level buildings to allow more green areas, and underground car parks.
'As scientists we have a responsibility to tell the truth about frogs,' she said. 'We need to get back to nature. Where frogs thrive the environment is clean ' that's the proof. In my garden at home there's always a frog.'
