- The extinction of the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, named Toughie, in 2016 received little media coverage, prompting environmental journalist Jeremy Hance to express his anger in an article for The Guardian.
- Musician Talia Schlanger was deeply moved by Hance’s article and wrote a song titled “The Endling” as a tribute to Toughie.
- The Earth is facing an extinction crisis driven by human activity and amphibians like Toughie have experienced massive population declines due to the chytrid fungus.
- Schlanger and Hance say that art and storytelling play a vital role in helping people connect emotionally to the biodiversity crisis.
When the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) died in 2016 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, its extinction garnered little media attention. Environmental journalist Jeremy Hance, a longtime Mongabay reporter and editor, expressed his outrage in a story for The Guardian, titled “Frog goes extinct, media yawns.”
“It’s so rare to be able to know when the last one goes,” Hance said. “When people didn’t cover that, it was so weird. This animal is not getting any coverage beyond the normal like, five paragraphs … I’m pissed off about this.”
One person who did take note was musician Talia Schlanger. Late one night in 2019, Schlanger read Hance’s article in her Paris sublet and was moved to tears. She dove into researching the frog species.
“I remember sitting at the little kitchen table and just sobbing. Absolutely sobbing,” Schlanger told Mongabay. “The song poured out of me.”
That song, titled “The Endling,” appears on Schlanger’s debut studio album, Grace for the Going, and pays tribute to Toughie, the last known Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog.
The term “endling” refers to the last known individual of a species or subspecies. When an endling dies, the species becomes extinct. The song’s haunting refrain, “You are the endling, the ending of a sound,” captures the finality of extinction.
The first time she performed the song live, Schlanger said, she felt a bit nervous about how it would be received.
“I was a bit shaky because I was like, ‘What are people going to think about a song that is a eulogy for a frog they’ve never heard of before?’” she said. But Schlanger’s poetic, science-infused lyrics struck a chord with the audience.
She tried to tuck in some science facts, she said, “but in a poetic, weird way.” For instance, Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrogs lived in the canopy of Panama’s tropical rainforests. There, they laid eggs in the pools of water captured by epiphytic plants. Schlanger incorporated this into her lyrics:
“Long gone the daughter who left you in water
The son of a song, a seed of tone
There in the cavity with nothing to eat
You fought to grow limbs of your own
And yours would have done the same
But their chance never came around.”
The frog had a distinctive call, and Schlanger said she imagined the last time the frog made a sound in the forest. She thought of all the plants and other life that lived alongside the frog for thousands of years and imagined them missing this sound, a sentiment captured in the lyrics:
“Now there’s only an echo where your lullaby used to be
And the leaves wonder where you went every time they try to sleep.”
The Earth is in the midst of an extinction crisis. But unlike past extinction events, this one is caused by humans, driven by habitat destruction and fragmentation, poaching, illegal trade, overharvesting, the introduction of nonnative and domesticated species into the wild, pathogens, pollution, and climate disruption.
“The ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible,” wrote the authors of a 2020 study on extinction.
Over the last century, more than 540 species of vertebrates (animals with backbones) have gone extinct, including the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), the Round Island burrowing boa (Bolyeria multocarinata), the laughing owl (Ninox albifacies), the sea mink (Neovison macrodon) and the golden toad (Incilius periglenes), to name a few.
And those are just the ones we know of.
The golden toad‘s case is emblematic of massive amphibian declines triggered by chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which causes a disease that eats away at an amphibian’s skin, ultimately killing it. More than 500 amphibian species have seen chytrid-related declines over the past decades. In many countries, the amphibian pet trade has expedited the spread of the fungus.
Toughie, the Endling, was spared from chytrid, but the rest of his kin were not so lucky.
Schlanger and hundreds of other artists and music industry professionals have signed onto Music Declares Emergency to “call for an immediate governmental response to protect all life on Earth.”
“This could be the easiest stuff for us to talk about…It’s on all of our minds,” Schlanger said. “It shouldn’t be controversial to say that we have a crisis that needs attention.”
Hance agrees that art and storytelling play a vital role in helping people connect emotionally to the biodiversity crisis. When he heard “The Endling,” he said, he felt overwhelmed.
“It is just really beautiful. And it felt very emotional,” he said. “I think one of the things that we are going to increasingly need in this age of climate change and extinction are ways to mourn what we are losing collectively, together if possible, but also individually. And one of the best ways to mourn something is through art.”
Schlanger’s striking music video for “The Endling” was directed by Yuan Liu. Inspired by the song’s “velvety and warm sorrow,” Liu said she incorporated visual elements reflecting environmental loss and the urgency to find solutions.
“To me, this video shows [Schlanger’s] poetic rewilding to the factual acceleration of our environmental loss,” Liu said. “The story of an endling pauses our breath, slows us down, inspires us to do the environment a gentle deed.”
The artistic decisions in the song and video were very deliberate, Schlanger said. In the video, she wears an avant-garde gown designed by ASATO with a lacy front and a suspended human-like form trailing behind. To her, it evokes the song’s message in a powerful way.
“The garment is a true visual representation of the lyric ‘carry your body,’” Schlanger said. “It evokes how as humans so much of our ‘progress’ sees us facing forward while forcing other beings to wither and to bend behind us.”
In this era of extinction, Hance said he believes commemorating species lost is essential, even if the media fails to pay attention. He said he sees “The Endling” as a chance to mourn a loss that belongs to all of us.
“I really think that we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not cataloging and commemorating and mourning the Age of Extinction that we’re currently in,” he said. “I just felt really honored that she took this story, my little angry rant, and turned it into something so beautiful.”
Banner image is a still from Talia Schlanger’s music video ‘The Endling’ directed by Yuan Liu.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
Citation:
Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Raven, P. H. (2020). Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(24), 13596-13602. doi:10.1073/pnas.1922686117
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