When the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) died in 2016 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, its extinction garnered little media attention. Environmental journalist Jeremy Hance, a longtime Mongabay reporter and editor, expressed his outrage in a story for The Guardian, titled “Frog goes extinct, media yawns.” “It’s so rare to be able to know when the last one goes,” Hance said. “When people didn’t cover that, it was so weird. This animal is not getting any coverage beyond the normal like, five paragraphs … I’m pissed off about this.” One person who did take note was musician Talia Schlanger. Late one night in 2019, Schlanger read Hance’s article in her Paris sublet and was moved to tears. She dove into researching the frog species. “I remember sitting at the little kitchen table and just sobbing. Absolutely sobbing,” Schlanger told Mongabay. “The song poured out of me.” That song, titled “The Endling,” appears on Schlanger’s debut studio album, Grace for the Going, and pays tribute to Toughie, the last known Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog. The term “endling” refers to the last known individual of a species or subspecies. When an endling dies, the species becomes extinct. The song’s haunting refrain, “You are the endling, the ending of a sound,” captures the finality of extinction. The first time she performed the song live, Schlanger said, she felt a bit nervous about how it would be received. “I was a bit shaky because I was like, ‘What are people going to think about…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Haunting song pays tribute to Toughie, the frog whose extinction went unnoticed appeared first on EnviroLink Network.