As 2023 draws to a close, one highlight of the year has been our recent publication in the conservation journal Oryx on localised trade of the world’s largest frog, the Goliath Frog (Conraua goliath), co-authored by myself and led by Cameroonian conservation and ecology scientist, Dr Geraud Tasse. The study looked at local people’s knowledge of Goliath Frogs, whether they consumed them and shadowed a subset of the hunters. This covered several sites across Cameroon, including the Pygmy communities in the South Region. We found that a lot of the consumption was in the household with a subset of the hunted frogs going to market. We got figures on the financial value of the hunted frogs. And the season of hunting. We also gleaned what international trade data we could find. This was all basic information, but to our incredulity, this sort of socio-economic appraisal had never been published before. This work was a long time overdue despite the importance of the issue at hand for this iconic species. I had been aware of Goliath Frogs from my late childhood, a species that has held my imagination and fuelled my devotion to African forest species through my career. There is a life-sized model at the Natural History Museum London, and reputably this frog has never been held successfully in captivity. It had long been known that this large frog was hunted for its meat, being granted the highest protection class from the Cameroon government at the same level as gorillas and elephants, and listed as Endangered by the IUCN in 2004. Around this time, there had been conservation projects examining this species in Cameroon (with none across the border in Equatorial Guinea), but ended up not publishing most of its findings (though this was being chased up, alas set back by funding). By the time I was working in Cameroon in 2006, this program had closed and I assumed others would be working on it, with my interest focusing on far less and arguably far more threatened mountain frogs. Of course I still had an interest in helping where I could (one’s mantra for conservation should be to help things happen). Years went by and many researchers came and went, either with an interest in reviving Goliath Frog conservation efforts, some crass inquiries about bringing them into captivity or others just to see the frogs themselves and do more superficial studies, if any at all. Many researchers would record Goliath Frogs during general biodiversity surveys, including my own. I didn't see one myself until many years later, after a couple of failed site visits that included having to walk for hours out of an area in the middle of the night when two villages threatened to attack each other. More work would eventually be done on their terrestrial habitat associations (i.e. would they be affected by deforestation?) by Dr Gonwouo Nono LeGrand of the University of Yaoundé I (also a co-author of our new paper), as well as the impressive work by Frogs & Friends on the reproductive ecology of this frog. What has been apparent is the shear lack of details on the offtake and socio-economics of the hunting of this frog. It might have been that social aspects of the study were out of the confident venture by those researching the frogs. But this information is needed to help direct evidence-based measures for conservation action – do we change the law? Do we engage with hunters? How should we engage with anyone at all??? Even the IUCN assessment for the Goliath Frog in 2004 made scant mention of socio-economic context that drove the hunting of this species. In 2018, the IUCN Redlist provided the opportunity for us to put this right, and it is now listed in the species’ assessment. So when Cameroonian herpetologist Geraud Tasse mentioned to me he wanted to work on Goliath Frog, this was the opportunity to start filling this gap. We met and made a plan of action, how to design questionnaires, how to approach stakeholders, how extensive and ambitious we could be. In 2019 we put forward a funding bid to do the more ambitious project and study, but got knocked back. We had no feedback, but one senior colleague thought it was because our team did not seem to have a social science background, a symptom of your searchable profile having a number of papers of a particular theme under one’s belt that can obscure your other skills that have not been so fortunate to create papers. In this case, all my and Geraud’s community conservation and socio-economic survey experience (which is far from perfect) went unnoticed amidst our chytrid fungus and frog ecology research that has accumulated more cited papers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t! Despite being declined sufficient funding to undertake dedicated works on this issue, enough survey work on the perspectives of Goliath Frogs finally reached a publishable threshold, and it is finally now “out”. It is still just a guide on how conservation work might be directed to help people and this frog live alongside each other into the distant future. There is always someone wanting to work on the Goliath Frog. Hopefully this work will help guide them a bit better on how they might conserve them a bit better.
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