Supply, demand, extinction

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Back in the 90s, Ivan Lozano Ortega was in charge of Bogota's wildlife rescue center. And he kept getting calls from the airport to come deal with... frogs. Hundreds of brightly colored, poisonous frogs.

Ivan had stumbled upon the poisonous frog black market. Tens of thousands of frogs were being poached out of the Colombian rainforest and sold to collectors all around the world by smugglers. And it put these endangered frogs at risk of going extinct.

Today on the show, how Ivan tried to put an end to the poison frog black market, by breeding and selling frogs legally. And he learns that it's not so easy to get a frog out of hot water.

This episode was hosted by Stan Alcorn and Sarah Gonzalez, and co-reported and written with Charlotte de Beauvoir. It was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Josh Newell. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:03.4	It was around 9.30 at night on a Sunday in 1998.
0:10.6	Iván Lozano Ortega is at his house in Bogota, Colombia.
0:14.6	And he's getting ready to go to sleep when he gets a call.
0:17.9	We are calling from the Bogota International Airport,
0:22.1	I'm with the police, and we just found a bag full of frogs.
0:28.3	A bag full of frogs.
0:31.4	And I say, OK.
0:32.9	The reason they call the Ván is that Iván was in charge of Bogota's Wildlife Rescue Center.
0:38.1	It was like this exotic animal orphanage where people would send animals that somebody,
0:43.6	for some reason, had taken out of the wild.
0:46.5	We were used to receive a monkey, a parrot, and a turtle today.
0:50.6	Yeah, they'd get turtles, monkeys.
0:53.4	One time they even got a bear.
0:55.0	And they were kind of like, OK, yeah.
0:58.2	Sure, we can handle a bear.
1:00.1	You can feed a bear.
1:01.2	I mean, it's easy to feed a bear.
1:03.2	But they weren't prepared, apparently, for frogs.
1:07.2	And it was a lot of frogs.
1:09.1	The police told them they were like 400.
1:11.1	And I was like, what?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.