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Title: Memento Mori: We Endlings Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 26, 2017 Language: en Topics: ecology, extinction Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/09/26/memento-mori-we-endlings-a-message-from-toughie
In an era when cartoon frog memes urge us to welcome totalitarianism,
here’s a true story about a real frog. Toughie, the last of the Rabbs’
fringe-limbed treefrogs, passed away one year ago today. What can he
tell us about ourselves and the future of our own species?
Around the turn of the century, in the cloud forests of central Panama,
a frog named Toughie lived in the treetops of the mountain slopes that
face the Pacific above the town of El Valle de AntĂłn.
As a little tadpole, he grew up under the forest canopy in a pool of
water that had gathered in a hole in a tree trunk. His father guarded
the hole, climbing down into the water to let Toughie and his siblings
nibble the skin off his back for sustenance. Later, as an adult, Toughie
likely returned to that same pool or another like it to raise little
tadpoles of his own.
Toughie had enormous hands and feet. Each of his fingers and toes ended
in a pad affording him traction on the trees of his home. His hands and
feet were webbed so he could leap from a treetop, spread them out, and
glide down through the air to land on another tree or settle on the
earth below. His skin was a rich red brown, bejeweled with green flecks
that he could change at will, like a chameleon. But the most striking of
his features were the deep, soulful eyes with which he surveyed the
treetops of the cloud forest.
After nightfall, especially under a full moon or during the warm nights
of spring, the forest would come alive with the songs of Toughie’s kin.
First, each little frog would make a call like an owl, consisting of
between three and five notes; then, immediately following it, a single
barking “grrrrrck.” Each of these frogs was advertising a little pool of
water in the crook of a tree limb or a broken tree trunk in which a new
generation of tadpoles might grow up, nourished by the skin of their
father.
Colonization and industrialization have been destroying the forests that
sustain frogs like Toughie for centuries, but Toughie’s little corner of
the world remained fairly stable until 2005. That year, two new arrivals
made their appearance in the woods where Toughie lived.
One was a skin disease, amphibian chytrid fungus, which may have been
brought to Central America with Xenopus frogs that humans imported from
Africa. The frogs that caught this fungus slowed down and became
erratic. Eventually, their skin peeled off and they suffered
convulsions, ulcers, and hemorrhaging. Many frogs and other amphibians
in Toughie’s forest died this way.
The other new arrival was a field expedition of scientists. They climbed
into the trees, scooping up the tadpoles they found in pools of water
gathered in the trunks. One of them caught Toughie and confined him in a
little vivarium along with the other frogs like him. Within two years,
the forest had fallen silent.
Toughie and his kin were brought back to the United States and divided
up between the Zoo and the Botanical Garden in Atlanta, Georgia. In
2008, the scientists who had captured them declared that they were a new
species with their very own Latin name, Ecnomiohyla rabborum. In
English, they called the species Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog. The
captive specimens in Atlanta were the last known examples on earth.
They gave Toughie to the Botanical Garden and paired him with a female.
Yet far from the cloud forests of Panama, the two declined to mate.
Toughie had stopped singing shortly after his capture. He and his
companion bided their time in captivity, staring silently out the
windows of their cage.
Toughie’s companion passed away quietly in 2009. She was the last female
known to exist.
Toughie’s only surviving kin was another male housed in the Atlanta Zoo.
On February 17, 2012, scientists put him to death to extract his genetic
material. This left Toughie the last of his kind.
The term for a creature that is the sole survivor of his species is
endling. This neologism has only recently become necessary in our
language. Others have suggested the expression terminarch.
Scientists don’t usually name their specimens; they ascribe numbers to
them, as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz. Toughie owes his
name to the two-year-old son of the Amphibian Conservation Coordinator
of the Botanical Garden, who christened him upon learning of his plight.
Only a person too young to be desensitized to the typical plight of
animals could properly recognize and name him.
Alone, Toughie persisted in his enclosure at the Botanical Garden,
persevering from one year to the next—for one never knows what the
future may bring. His handlers touched him gingerly, abashed before his
mournful gaze, his big eyes seeming to peer through them.
Toughie hadn’t made a noise since shortly after his capture in 2005.
Finally, on December 15, 2014, he raised his voice again, and for the
last time, the song of his people was heard. His call echoed throughout
the storage container in which he was imprisoned, unfamiliar to his
captors. A song of inquiry, perhaps entreaty, with no answer. Toughie
the endling.
Toughie died on September 26, 2016. His image has been projected onto
the side of the UN building in New York City and onto St. Peter’s
Basilica during the Climate Talks in Paris.
---
It’s easy enough to identify our feelings about the developers and
executives whose behavior is destroying the environments that frogs like
Toughie depend on. If not for industrialism, we wouldn’t be losing
biodiversity everywhere around the world. This isn’t about a single
fungus; it’s about human interventions that have knocked the entire
biosphere out of balance. In many of the places we live, magical species
like Toughie’s were exterminated so long ago that we cannot even
identify what has been lost. When so little wilderness remains intact,
countless species are only a generation away from extinction.
Documenting the remaining species as they blink out one by one is not
enough. The only proper mourning would be to take concrete steps to shut
down the global industries that are exterminating them.
From the perspective of the scientists, Toughie’s death is tragic
because it marks the end of a species. In other words—it represents a
loss of biological data. Yet one might say that this understanding of
Toughie’s story is itself an expression of the same way of viewing the
world that brought about the destruction of his homeland and his people.
Toughie’s refusal to breed is a message for us. He and his companion
chose not to raise tadpoles. Offered the option of surviving in
captivity, like Melville’s Bartleby, they preferred not to.
What they were trying to tell us is that some things are more precious
than mere genetic survival. The real tragedy of Toughie’s story is not
the loss of biological data, but the confinement of an individual
creature away from its perishing homeland.
---
In a sense, we are all endlings, each the last of our kind. Centralizing
the question of whether we can reproduce—or whether we choose to
reproduce—reflects a patriarchal focus on lineage and reproduction.
There are many other ways to understand what gives life meaning. When we
set aside the abstract category of species, we see that each of us is
unique, each of us is the bearer of a singular and unrepeatable world.
Through this lens, William Watkins, the scientist who discovered the
lone whale that sings at the frequency 52 hertz, is just as singular as
the whale in whose solitary song he heard an echo of his own
individuality.
We are all going extinct, one by one. When we come to terms with our
mortality, with the certainty that the earth will perish, consumed by
the sun, what matters is not the preservation of our genetic material
like information in a database, but that we live fully in the present
moment.
Rather than mourning the loss of biodiversity, a scientific abstraction,
let us experience the end of Toughie’s people as the loss of countless
Toughies, countless unique individuals. The tragedy that is being
inflicted on the earth right now is a composite of all the Toughies
confined in slaughterhouses, fisheries, and cubicles—all the lives that
are taken from us, all the potential that is foreshortened by a
civilization based in destructive resource extraction and top-down
control.
This is not a critique of all technology, but a call to evaluate
technological systems according to how they increase or diminish our
freedom and the freedom of all living things. Biological life is not the
only value, just as biological death is not the worst thing that can
befall a creature or a species.
There are two ways of conceptualizing what human extinction might mean.
Ordinarily, it is understood biologically, as the end of the line of
human genetic material. But we could also understand it as our species’
total assimilation into a system of control, leaving the cloud forest
for confinement in a glass box in the Botanical Garden.
We can imagine a biologist who, coming upon an endling, chooses to leave
it in its environment to die on its own terms, insofar as such a thing
is possible at all today. Similarly, rather than looking to scientists
and administrators to manage our survival in an increasingly violent and
toxic world, we might seek to open spaces of freedom and potential
outside the logic of management and control, whatever the consequences.
Let’s take Toughie’s life as a memento mori, a reminder to honor what is
unique in all of us, to celebrate our tremendous capacity for creativity
and for freedom.