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ROBERT Hopkins (75) is a world renowned frog research academic. At his age he is past retirement but that didn’t stop him from making history when he led a team of researchers to Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands to find a frog specie last seen in 1962.
When Sunday News visited him at his home in Bulawayo for a cup of tea, he spoke with passion about nothing but frogs, at times glaring at the ceiling. He could easily resemble the fictional character of an old Indiana Jones with a wealth of adventures that took him to some of the riskiest places on earth and came out alive.
“I wasn’t up on the mountain when the frogs were discovered. As you can see I am old and not really in my best of health,” he said.
The ground breaking search team had Francios Becker an MSc student at the University of Cape Town, and Herbst Scott a Bsc student in entomology from Rhodes University, Robert’s wife Veronica, Fungayi Marfudze and Tor Simonson who were guides from Outward Bound School with the help of the Conservation Club of Chimanimani.
Their mission was to find the existence of a breed of small frogs known by their scientific name as Arthroleptis troglodytes otherwise known as “Cave or sinkhole squeaker”.
No known material had previously been collected since the initial 16 specimens were found in 1962, and described by the late Professor Poynton the following year. Fifty four years had gone by and successive annual searches since 1980 had yielded no results. But finally recently, Hopkins and his team with the aid of the Mohamed bin Zayed Conservation Fund broke ground.
“It’s hard to see these frogs because they don’t even grow as big as your thumb nail,” he said, as he showed this reporter the ones he is breeding at his home nursery.
Interestingly, Hopkins aunt, Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (24 February 1907-17 May 2004) in 1936 East London South Africa discovered a fish specie that was understood to have become extinct 200 million years ago.
“It could have been one of those creatures of 200 million years ago come alive again,” scientists said of her find.
Back to the Cave squeaker, there’s no place in the world where its natural habitat is known to be other than an area of 5,2 square acres around and in the vicinity of Bundi River in Chimanimani.
Over the years, it was speculated that the rare frogs could be found across the river well into Mozambique, However, no specimen was found there.
“Herpetologists attending a meeting in Cape Town in November 2015 agreed that these frogs were part of the top 10 most endangered species. Since we have found them, we resolved to breed them ex-situ because human activity such as mining in the area could finish whatever remains of them,” he said.
The inclusion of Becker, the man who actually spotted the frogs was because he had to study what they ate to keep them alive as the world wondered about their existence for the past 54 years.
“He used his knowledge to locate them even though it was his first encounter. He first located four males and later a female.
They are alive and eating well and I hope they breed and we study more of them and their mannerisms,” he said.
There’s been worldwide interest in the exclusively Zimbabwean find of note is Professor Alan Channing of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa who has requested to study the frogs’ DNA.
Hopkins is a research associate at the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. For this world famous rediscovery, he has engaged National Parks to come on board to help create sanctuaries for this nearly extinct frog. Admittedly, he’s past his prime and his wish is to see more young scientists taking up the challenge.
“I had relatively young people on this team. They have a bright future and my hope is to see more and more youngsters in this field. In all these years I have been researching; I learnt that there’s a lot we don’t know about our country. It takes dedicated researchers to unearth some of the things we are not aware of,” he said.
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Bongani Ndlovu