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After the cops left, Corben decided to move the frog from one aquarium to the other.
Stressed by the removal of the rocks he’d placed in the tank for shelter, the frog rose to the surface – and forcibly ejected from its mouth six tadpoles.
The gastric-brooding frog, native to Queensland.Credit: Peter Schouten / Search for Lost Species
In its new aquarium, the frog hung vertically in the water, with just its eyes and nostrils above the waterline. Viewed through the glass, Corben says, the movement of juvenile frogs against the distended abdominal wall could be clearly seen.
On December 13, a decision was made to preserve the frog in the hope of finding the baby frogs in situ.
What happened next was even more dramatic: upon grabbing the frog by its hind legs, it promptly disgorged eight fully-formed frogs. Five more followed within minutes.
“What a moment! We were just stunned, we didn’t know what was going on,” Roberts wrote.
Corben, his friend Dr Glen Ingram and Adelaide herpetologist Mike Tyler wrote up their discovery for Nature. They rejected the submission, convinced it was a hoax.
It was an eerie echo of the platypus, the first specimens of which were dismembered by British scientists convinced it was a forgery.
Coincidentally, Ingram prefers the name platypus frog – but gastric-brooding sounded “clinical, almost grotesque”, he says.
Eventually their paper was published by Science, in December 1974.
The early ’70s, Ingram notes, was ground zero for the study of frogs in Australia: “Nothing was known! There were no field guides; we had to figure it all out ourselves. No one else was interested.”
The environmental movement was just getting going, too.
Ingram used to house-sit for poet Judith Wright, president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland.
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Soon he, Corben and Roberts would become involved in a vicious fight to save the Conondales from logging.
The sensation created by the gastric-brooding frog became central to that campaign.
Ingram, then at Queensland Museum, was offered a $20,000 grant to study the frog from the World Wildlife Fund – a lot of money at the time.
But a furious state environment department (then an amalgam of forestry and primary industries) pushed back.
It insisted the museum had no business in ecological research and warned of punishment by the ruling National Party.
Ingram was forbidden from speaking publicly about the frog and conducted his research “in defiance of silence”.
But he had an “in”, via a Lutheran friend who was able to reach the devout Sir Joh.
Eventually, Ingram was called into a meeting with the premier.
He was not a fan.
“I hated the National Party!” he says.
“But he was an unexpected delight.
“Suddenly you saw the charm and the warmth of the man up close and he was just fascinated.
“He kept getting me to imitate the calls of the frogs and the birds.”
Sir Joh unexpectedly ordered forestry to investigate the natural values of the Conondales.
By the early ’80s, Corben had been employed to help but there was a problem: the gastric-brooding frogs and several other species had vanished.
Ingram says it wasn’t until about 1990 that “we realised something bad had happened”.
By then, Sir Joh and the National Party had gone, deposed after 32 years amid the scandal of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police and political corruption in Queensland.
Curiously, it was another politician, an unusually keen environment minister in Wayne Goss’ Labor government named Pat Comben, who sounded the alarm.
Most scientists were unperturbed, as so little was known about the frogs that they simply assumed they would turn up again.
But they didn’t.
The southern gastric-brooding frog (and its cousin, the northern gastric brooding frog, found near Mackay) had fallen victim to chytrid fungus, a pathogen described in 1998 that has devastated amphibian populations worldwide.
It was declared extinct in 2000, having been known in the wild for a mere seven years.
Since then, there have been attempts to resurrect the frog via cloning (the so-called Project Lazarus, which had previously tried to bring back the Thylacine).
And yet like the Thylacine, hope persists.
Jodi Rowley, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Australian Museum and leader of the FrogID project, says DNA testing is being used in the frog’s old haunts to find proof of life.
“It’s possible,” she says.
“But I’m not holding my breath.”
Even Corben, who lists a number of frogs that vanished from the Conondale and Blackall Ranges and later reappeared, is sceptical – despite once betting a magnum of champagne with a friend Rheobatrachus would one day be rediscovered.
But that was decades ago.
“When do you give up on a species?” he says.
“Do people look for them still? Every year? In the rain? Do they really know how to find them? I don’t have much hope, though, that’s for sure.”
AAP
