7 Zoos Team Up to Save Wyoming's Rarest Toad

In a basement room beneath the busy strollers and families at Como Zoo in St. Paul, zookeeper Allison Pizel is saving a species from disappearing forever.

She works alone in a biosecure room, caring for some of North America's rarest amphibians. The Wyoming toad was thought to be extinct by the mid-1980s until a small group was accidentally discovered at a fishing pond in Wyoming's Laramie Basin.

Today, seven zoos and two breeding sites are working together to rebuild the species from scratch. All 650 Wyoming toads alive today descended from just ten individuals rescued from that pond.

Pizel's work involves precision and patience. She hibernates some toads in a special refrigerator, then wakes them to breed while playing recordings of their croaks on an old CD player.

This year brought major success. After a disappointing 2024 when only one toad named Meatball survived to adulthood, Pizel recently shipped 3,000 tadpoles to Wyoming for release into the wild.

The toads face serious challenges in their mountain valley home. A historic drought this year has dried up many of the wetlands they need to survive and reproduce.

But the breeding program keeps improving. Derek Benson at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo tracks every toad birth and breeding pair across all sites to maximize genetic diversity from the tiny gene pool.

His efforts are working. Over the past decade, genetic diversity has increased, and wild toads have successfully bred every single year.

The Ripple Effect

The Wyoming toad recovery shows what's possible when institutions work together for a common goal. Nine separate facilities coordinate their efforts, sharing knowledge and animals to give this species a fighting chance.

Wendy Estes-Zumpf from Wyoming Game and Fish sees deeper meaning in the work. The Wyoming toad evolved uniquely in the Laramie Basin after glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, making it a special piece of Wyoming's natural history.

She describes them as awkward little creatures with grumpy faces who somehow persisted for thousands of years. "It is Wyoming's toad, and we can't just sit back and let it wink out," she says.

This August, Pizel and her fellow zookeepers will travel to Wyoming to search for toads in the wild and meet with conservation partners. Como Zoo is also planning to move the breeding program to a larger space where visitors can watch the work through a window.

Despite droughts and disease, these grumpy-faced survivors are hopping toward recovery thanks to people who refuse to give up on them.