Twan Leenders has always been fascinated by the exotic, colorful creatures of tropical rainforests. Growing up in the Netherlands — where exotic frogs and snakes are rather hard to come by — he scoured every book on rainforests and their creatures he could find, and went on to earn a degree in animal ecology, setting him off on a journey that would take him across the world.
Leenders will be speaking at 12:15 p.m. today at Smith Wilkes Hall for the final installment of this summer’s Bird, Tree & Garden Club’s Brown Bag Lecture Series. His lecture will explore his work with amphibians in the rainforests of Central America, focusing especially on his experience with frogs in the region.
“Everybody wants to save the polar bears and the panda bears, all that kind of stuff,” Leenders said. “I was really interested in the sort of underdogs, and the more you learn about amphibians especially, … they’re just absolutely fascinating creatures.”
Leenders currently serves as director of conservation at the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy, but he still spends much of his free time working with some of the frogs he spent decades studying and trying to protect. The reason his work with frogs has become so important, he said, is because huge portions of the frog populations that he researched in Central America have disappeared, thanks in large part to human encroachment and the rampant spread of fungal diseases.
Even in areas seemingly untouched by humanity, Leenders added, frog populations were dying off at alarming rates, with some species that had been in certain areas for ages seemingly disappearing from one year to the next. These disappearances left many researchers and experts at a complete loss, unsure of what they should do next.
“There was no playbook for this kind of stuff. We were not used to these things just disappearing overnight,” Leenders said. “And, of course, we’re talking about animals that nobody really cared a whole lot about.”
With his lecture, Leenders hopes to address two crucial things: the work he and other experts have done to start reviving these rapidly disappearing frog populations, and also dispelling some of the negative connotations associated with amphibians — like frogs — and reptiles.
Many people simply view frogs and other animals like them as “slimy and gross and inferior,” he said, but they hold significant value in teaching humans more about areas that are just beginning to be researched, especially in the area of biomedicine. The ability of salamanders to reproduce entire limbs within days, for example, or how colorful dart frogs in the Amazon basin produce some of the deadliest toxins on the planet, could serve as springboards into critical biomedical research that can greatly improve scientific understanding of humanity.
“There’s just so many biomedical applications that are hidden in these animals that are being ignored,” Leenders said. “But there’s so much more going on with them, so part of what I’m hoping to do … is highlight some of that, and show people a little bit about these incredible abilities that these animals have.”
He hopes that Chautauquans will leave his lecture with not only a deeper understanding and appreciation for the value that frogs and other “slimy” animals can have to humanity, but with the knowledge that there is lots of work being done to save these creatures that are often critical parts of the ecosystems they thrive in.
“At first, everything was dying around me, and all the frogs were going extinct,” Leenders said. “I’m at the point where things are slowly coming back — I can’t let it go.”
