"EL VALLE, Panama — In moist, mossy rooms, rows of glass aquariums bathed in eerie light shelter the last of the last of the frogs. It is a secure facility, for here reside the sole survivors of their species, rescued from the wild before a modern plague swept through their forests and streams in a ferocious doomsday event that threatens the planet’s amphibians with extinction."

"The lab smells like a junior-high locker room where the bleach is losing. Perhaps it is all the crickets, larvae, flies — the food that is keeping the frogs alive. They are safe, at least for now, in what scientists are calling an 'amphibian ark.'

But time is running out.

The frogs have been captives for five or six years, and frogs do not live forever."

William Booth reports for the Washington Post December 30, 2012. [2]