3,000 Wyoming Toads Return Home After Zoo Breeding Win

A brown blob named Meatball just became a symbol of hope for one of North America's most endangered species.

Meatball is the only Wyoming toad that survived from egg to adult this year at Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota. But her story comes with a celebration: zookeeper Allison Pizel just FedExed 3,000 of Meatball's tadpole relatives to Wyoming, marking a huge rebound from last year's disappointing breeding season.

The Wyoming toad was thought extinct by the mid-1980s. Then someone accidentally spotted them at a private fishing pond in Wyoming's Laramie Basin, their only natural home in the world. But that population crashed by 1989 due to a deadly skin fungus, pesticides, and shrinking habitat.

Biologists rescued the remaining toads and started a breeding program that now spans seven zoos plus two other breeding sites. Every living Wyoming toad today descended from just ten individuals. That tiny gene pool makes recovery incredibly challenging.

Pizel works alone in a biosecure basement room, avoiding contact with other amphibians to protect her toads from chytrid fungus. Each year, she hibernates some toads in what she calls a fancy refrigerator, then brings them out to breed with help from hormones and an ancient CD player that plays toad croaks.

This year's success came from learning what went wrong before. Last year, some toads died in hibernation and Pizel bred males that were too young to fertilize eggs effectively.

Derek Benson at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo manages the studbook for all 650 captive Wyoming toads. He carefully tracks every birth, death, and breeding pair to maximize genetic diversity across the program. Over the past decade, that diversity has actually increased despite the tiny founding population.

The toads are breeding in the wild again too. But they still can't sustain themselves without help, especially now.

The Bright Side

Wyoming is facing epic drought conditions that dried up many of the wetlands where tadpoles need to develop. Wendy Estes-Zumpf from Wyoming Game and Fish says this year is even worse than last year's drought, limiting where they can release the tadpoles arriving from zoos.

But Estes-Zumpf sees reason for hope in the toads themselves. These awkward little creatures with grumpy faces aren't agile jumpers like frogs. They just crawl around slowly, surviving against the odds for 10,000 years since glaciers created their valley home.

The Wyoming toad evolved from Canadian toads into something unique to Laramie. Estes-Zumpf says that makes them worth fighting for as part of Wyoming's natural heritage.

Pizel plans to visit Wyoming in August to meet partners and search for toads in the wild. She's also excited about potentially moving her breeding program to a larger space where zoo visitors could watch through a window and meet these humble survivors.

What's most encouraging is how many people across the country are working to make sure Wyoming's only toad doesn't disappear.