Texas Fauna Project

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEWEE: Michael Forstner

INTERVIEWER: David Todd

DATE: August 28, 2024

LOCATION: San Marcos, Texas

SOURCE MEDIA: M4A, MP3 audio files

TRANSCRIPTION: Trint, David Todd

REEL: 4209

FILE: HoustonToad_Forstner_Mike_SanMarcosTX_28August2024_Reel4209.mp3

 

David Todd [00:00:02] All right. Well, good morning. Good afternoon, rather. David Todd here. I have the privilege of being here with Dr. Mike Forstner. And with his permission, we plan on recording this interview for research and educational work on behalf of a non-profit group called the Conservation History Association of Texas, as well as for a book and a website for Texas A&M University Press, and finally for an archive at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

 

David Todd [00:00:33] And I wanted to stress that he would have all rights to use the recording as he sees fit. And I wanted to make sure, before we plunge into this that he feels like that’s a good arrangement.

 

Mike Forstner [00:00:46] That works for me.

 

David Todd [00:00:47] Okay, great. It is Wednesday, August 28^th, 2024. It’s about 2:05 P.M. Central Time. My name, as I said, is David Todd. I’m representing the Conservation History Association of Texas, and I am in Austin. We are conducting a remote interview with Dr. Mike Forstner, who I believe is based in the San Marcos, Texas area.

 

Mike Forstner [00:01:13] That’s correct.

 

David Todd [00:01:13] Oh, okay. Good. Thanks for confirming that. Dr. Forstner teaches and does research in the Department of Biology at Texas State University, where he is a Regent’s Professor as well as Curator of Vertebrate Collections. He has an interest in integrating molecular systematics in species conservation and has done a variety of projects with reptiles and amphibians, including research on the Houston toad.

 

David Todd [00:01:40] Today we’ll talk about Dr. Forstner’s life and career to date, and as just one example of his interests and work, we’ll focus on what he can tell us about the Houston toad and its study and conservation.

 

David Todd [00:01:53] So, with that little introduction, I thought I would jump into some questions, and the first one would be about whether there might be any people or events in Dr. Forstner’s early years, in his childhood, that might have inspired an interest in wildlife, amphibians, the outdoors, any related topics?

 

Mike Forstner [00:02:14] I had an indulgent set of sisters and mother. So, all the weird little kid stuff that was, “I don’t want to play football”, “I want to go chase indigos on the edge of the resaca in South Texas” was enabled rather than punished.

 

Mike Forstner [00:02:32] I can remember mother reporting in subsequent years about me being young, so, 10, 11, and making her get up at 5:00 in the morning on a school day so we could go and check the trap line, that had live catch traps to catch the rodents that I used to feed the snakes I had in very jury-rigged, very insecure cages in the garage.

 

Mike Forstner [00:03:02] I think that, absent the indulgence that was their investment in my interests, I wouldn’t be where I’m sitting today.

 

David Todd [00:03:11] That’s interesting. So, it sounds like sort of a benevolent household. Was there any particular kind of encouragement or tutelage, you know, for these things that you were interested in?

 

Mike Forstner [00:03:26] Until I was probably 17 years old, I didn’t meet anyone that was interested in the things that I was interested in. I had the standard group of rogues that ran around on bicycles and did things, but they were more interested in riding to the Sonic for a slushie, instead of riding with me toward the Arroyo Colorado to try to catch rattlesnakes. It’s a very different thing.

 

Mike Forstner [00:03:52] I think the advantage I had is I had a rural Texas upbringing, even though we lived within the city limits of Harlingen in South Texas.

 

David Todd [00:04:05] So, and what was the target of most of your escapades? It sounds like you’ve mentioned indigos and rattlesnakes. Any other animals that really got your interest?

 

Mike Forstner [00:04:18] So being quest-driven turns out to be an advantage when I got into doing science for real.

 

Mike Forstner [00:04:25] If I do science for real, but we will pretend. So, it was always something.

 

Mike Forstner [00:04:31] I can remember being quite small and looking in the cornfield next to the trailer park that we lived in, thinking I might find a corn snake. And when I failed over and over again, going to the library to then find out that the reason you’re failing is there aren’t corn snakes for 630 miles.

 

Mike Forstner [00:04:51] So, I really think that all of it was directed to whatever that interest was in that summer or that season, be it a turtle, a snake, a lizard. Texas, of course, has the strong advantage of having such high reptile and amphibian diversity.

 

Mike Forstner [00:05:09] But when I tell people that I would have been pre-teen when I began catching snakes like black-striped snakes, which only occur in South Texas, today that sounds exciting and rare, but to me it was what was in the backyard.

 

David Todd [00:05:31] Okay, well, it sounds like you were sort of an autodidact. But were there some some books? I mean, you mentioned you went to the library. Were there books, journals, magazines, TV shows, movies that you might have seen that kind of furthered you down this track?

 

Mike Forstner [00:05:51] I ate books like other kids ate candy. My main diversion when it wasn’t warm enough to be outside and I didn’t have things to do for school, was reading, and it didn’t matter what, it didn’t matter where. But I went through everything in the Harlingen Public Library that I could lay my hands on.

 

Mike Forstner [00:06:10] I think that that’s probably to blame for most of the reasons people get irritable with me today in discussion is I have a head full of useless information.

 

David Todd [00:06:23] And was there anybody in school, either in elementary school or all the way through your many years in grad school, who might have been somebody who was, you know, sort of a partner in crime on this stuff?

 

Mike Forstner [00:06:38] So, Harlingen and South Texas aren’t known for the quality of their early or high school education, in general. They’ve improved dramatically in the years since. But then, I was privileged that I had at least a teacher, really from third grade all the way up, that would consistently realize that weird little kid needs to be given something else to encourage what went on all the way through to sixth grade.

 

Mike Forstner [00:07:10] I moved into a private school for high school, thinking it might improve things. It didn’t, but even then we were able to do projects that kept me engaged at a time that otherwise would have been every other diversion that happens to a high school kid.

 

Mike Forstner [00:07:28] By the time I got to college, I made a critical failing when I went to Southwest Texas State University. I saw college as a, almost a box that had to get checked for me to do the things I wanted to do, rather than the experience of gaining knowledge I didn’t have. As a consequence, I did not engage with many faculty. I didn’t chase down the things that they were doing to gain skills. I just kept doing it on my own as often and as wide-ranging as I could.

 

Mike Forstner [00:08:02] By the time I got to my junior and senior year, that began to change mainly, I think, out of an investment of my undergraduate advisor who, oddly enough, when I took the job at Southwest Texas State, which is now Texas State University, I took his office because his tenure line is mine.

 

Mike Forstner [00:08:23] So, there was certainly a reciprocation of those benefits.

 

Mike Forstner [00:08:28] I would also argue that having failed to invest as an undergraduate in that way, during my senior year it became obvious that working with faculty to gain experiences was a big deal. So, I didn’t make that same mistake by the time I got to grad school.

 

David Todd [00:08:48] And when you did work with faculty, did you find that the really productive place was in a classroom, or in a laboratory, or out in the field? Where did you find that was really productive?

 

Mike Forstner [00:09:02] I don’t know about “productive”. I know what I liked to do. So, you would argue that productivity requires many things and that in-class work had to be done. But in laboratory work or in collection work, particularly at Sul Ross and then subsequently at A&M, those were as valuable to me over time as was the work in the field. But I have been and try to remain, although now I spend most of my time with my head glued to a slab of silicone because my job is now talking on the phone, outside and as far away from most normal human density as I can get, because the animals are still there.

 

Mike Forstner [00:09:45] And that was really enabled by the time I got to Sul Ross, I was able to do hundreds of nights in the field. And at A&M, I was able to keep up far less nights because of the laboratory and academic workload, but still able to be in the field each week, which turned out to be the carrot reinforcing the stick that was getting those degrees.

 

David Todd [00:10:12] Do you recall any field trips that were really offered some kind of epiphany for you?

 

Mike Forstner [00:10:20] I’m going to tease Sul Ross. So, I was privileged, both in my master’s with Jim Scudday as my major advisor, and when I got to A&M with Jim Dixon, who was Jim Scudday’s advisor, being co-chair of my committee. But we were on a field trip. And I brought up earlier that I spent a lot of time outside without guidance as an undergraduate, and that probably worked out about, like you would imagine. It’s like the horse that didn’t bother to get trained. It made it very difficult when training was required.

 

Mike Forstner [00:10:54] But I had a bunch of ideas and I had been in the Big Bend region a lot. We went on my very first graduate student professional field trip in field biology right after I got to Sul Ross. And on that field trip we went into southwestern Big Bend country, and Dr. Scudday drove a van. I had talked with him before, and I drove my truck. And we got to the field site. They set themselves up and I asked if they really were sure they should park on the other side of the creek. We entered and they parked on the far side of the creek, not on the near side of the creek. So if the creek were to flash, they were blocked.

 

Mike Forstner [00:11:42] And two days later, Calamity flashed, hard. And I heard it coming. What I have been told from other people who viewed these events is that an insane person ran down off of the mountain screaming about “Move the van!”.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:02] And they didn’t get the van out. And I went into town and they were stuck on the other side of the creek for two days.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:11] This did not help with reinforcing my view of the skills that I have gained the hard way were potentially as valuable or potentially more valuable than the skills that I was going to get with professional guidance.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:24] Dr. Scudday, however, brooked no disappointment in telling me, “I will not hear about this after we get out.”.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:32] But I don’t think there was a … I TA’d herpetology for Jim Dixon by the time I got to A&M.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:40] The field trips: it’s a strange thing. I had been doing the work that most people wait their lives to do for a decade before I ever got to the point that I was doing them in an official capacity, and I think that was both boon and bane.

 

Mike Forstner [00:12:54] But all of the field trips that we took … I TA’d a class in Mexico with Jim Dixon, which in many ways was like moving with someone who has done something hundreds of times, through a group of people that he knew, a group of collaborative researchers across Mexico that he knew, to field sites and to families and to properties that he had worked on for 35 years. For him, it was going back. For me, all of those places were new, and all of them were remarkable. Ah, Galapagos … again, the list just kept going. I didn’t say “no” very often.

 

David Todd [00:13:37] That’s good, I guess, to, you know, be open to what might come down the pike.

 

David Todd [00:13:42] So, one of the things that, you know, we’d really like to focus on with you because there’s a long list, I thought it’d may be productive to just try to narrow down to one creature, and that is this Houston toad, which I know you’ve studied for a number of years among all these other things. And, perhaps as a place to start, could you tell us what your first encounter with Houston toad might have been, and whether it was by sight or, you know, by sound, how you first ran across them?

 

Mike Forstner [00:14:14] So, if we talk about first detection, it would have been audio. Houston toads are somewhat unique in trying to study the amphibian, because very seldom do you ever see a Houston toad that’s not at a breeding pond. So, the primary method by which they’re detected is by listening for a unique call. And then depending on land access and legalities, you can move to the pond to physically see the animal.

 

Mike Forstner [00:14:41] At first, I was trained by Jim Dixon on how to conduct Houston toad surveys during 1991, and in 1992 did it by myself. That was some terrifying yippy-ha-ha stuff, but off we went.

 

Mike Forstner [00:14:56] Our surveys were concentrated in Bastrop County, and I can remember being told it was very unlikely that you would see one or find one, because this wasn’t an area in which they were expected to be present. It had been surveyed for one year. No detections had gone on. 1992 is going back, I mean, that’s practically the Stone Age. There were still triceratops in Texas then.

 

Mike Forstner [00:15:22] When we think about 1992, it was actually a fairly wet spring, compared to what happened the year after in ’93. In 1992, on a February morning, I pulled over. I used to get teased by my family about what I did was go, “Here, toad, here, toad,” in the dark at night, and it’s not all that far off.

 

Mike Forstner [00:15:48] A lot of times, sitting in a pickup truck listening out the window or from the tailgate, and I pulled up and immediately heard a toad calling, walked to the site that we had access to, and there were several male Houston toads in chorus at a location that was unexpected. It was the first detection in that small patch of habitat that had been done in almost a decade. So, it was a big deal.

 

Mike Forstner [00:16:17] And, I mean, the best part for me was being able to take a photograph. And again, folks, remember we were chipping rocks to send letters then. So, the camera required I shoot an image and I didn’t know if I had gotten the image. I used a flash. I used a flashlight. I did it without the flashlight. All of these things, because you can’t see what the image is.

 

Mike Forstner [00:16:39] And then I sent that roll of film off, and Jim Dixon looked at me the next morning when I was reporting back to him, and he said, “Are you sure?” And I said, “Oh yeah, I’m sure.” And it wasn’t in my mind, he told me later it wasn’t true, but in my mind, I didn’t prove myself to that man until I handed him the photos from the drugstore. I’m going to tell you it was from an Eckerd photo department place – a week later, paying extra. But he went, “Yep.”

 

Mike Forstner [00:17:11] So, for me, it turned out to be you can find something that’s incredibly rare, where it wasn’t inspected expected to be, if you’re doing your job. And that’s a theme that works all the way through to the present.

 

Mike Forstner [00:17:27] Toads are… It’s funny. When you think about Houston toads, most people are like, “Oh, they’ve got to be unique or different.” These are not different from the toads you see in your yard and in your back yard when you water your garden in the summer and a toad hops out.

 

Mike Forstner [00:17:43] In its fundamental aspects, Houston toads are just like the toads in your yard. They’re not the same, and they tend to require things that are different from the toad that’s most commonly encountered in Central Texas, which is the Gulf Coast toad. That’s a toad that’s moved northward, really off the coast of Texas as things have warmed in the state.

 

Mike Forstner [00:18:05] Houston toads have a more restricted habitat, and they also have never been doing as well. And that common toad I just talked about might be contributing to that.

 

Mike Forstner [00:18:16] But the basic life history is what you remember with your kids, or you remember when you were a kid, or you remember from working with your nieces and nephews. Toads lay eggs. In the case of toads, they’re in strands. So, it’s like little black B-Bs, lined up inside gelatin, in a tube. Those strands are laid in ponds. They hatch into tadpoles. Depending on the water temperature, 30 to 90 days later, those tadpoles engage in an activity that’s not dissimilar from any beach assault by an armed force. They hop ashore and they die by the hundreds.

 

Mike Forstner [00:18:55] That transition from water to air-breathing and terrestrial life isn’t easy. They make that change. And then, one of the interesting things, and we’re probably likely to get to it, is that the old way of thinking about Houston toads was they leave the pond and they hop away and they go underground. Well, the physics and energetics of that physiologically don’t work.

 

Mike Forstner [00:19:21] They hop away from the pollen in a wide, almost like a ripple when you drop a rock in a pool of water. They move away from the pond edge. They get more and more sparse as the diameter of that circle grows. But all of the while, they’re moving.

 

Mike Forstner [00:19:39] And what we know today is that juvenile toads are moving miles. Please imagine being the size of something that will fit on your pinky fingernail and hopping a mile. I work on the Texas State University campus, which is uphill in every direction no matter where you are or where you just walked. I will tell you that the idea of hopping a mile seems extraordinary to me, but we document it routinely. And in fact, they’re, for a related toad, some of those distances for juveniles can be tens of miles.

 

Mike Forstner [00:20:14] The adults then inhabit the uplands. The adults are in the wooded or savannah woodlands that are surrounding those pond sites. And again, they’re moving even larger distances over time. And while they don’t all return to the same breeding pond, generally half of the toads return to similar or close-by ponds from which they were born. And just like everyone you can remember in high school, half of those people stayed there, and the other half of them all dispersed. Toads are working the same way, at least based on the genetic data.

 

Mike Forstner [00:20:52] I often get asked, “Why do Houston toads matter?” And in my mind, it relates to the ecological niche. A Gulf Coast … I think, in some ways, the argument that I make is that Houston toads need something different from what a Gulf Coast toad requires. If what you want to live in looks like Bastrop County today, then you’re likely to be in support of a Houston toad, because they’re helping you to maintain a certain visual esthetic about living within pine forests and natural vegetation.

 

Mike Forstner [00:21:27] If instead, the warrens of Round Rock are where you want to live, where you plant a new ash tree because we cut down everything there was, Gulf Coast toads can persist.

 

Mike Forstner [00:21:39] So, I see Houston toads as a good indicator of a type of habitat and environment that a large group of people like to live in, and the toad will live with you, just like the ones we talked about in your backyard anyway, so long as you’re within.

 

David Todd [00:21:56] So I think you’ve given us an idea about their life history, and some idea about their ecological niche, I mean, depending on the terrain and landscape that they’re in. How would you describe, you know, their place in the pecking order, the food chain and so on that, that kind of ecological sense?

 

Mike Forstner [00:22:16] Toads are probably the most remarkable bug harvesters after bats that are out there. They don’t take aerial insects, but they vacuum the landscape for beetles, ants, etc.

 

Mike Forstner [00:22:30] They are certainly… It’s funny that you asked the question today. I just finished a thesis that’s now structurally complete that looked at the diet. So, where they are in the hierarchy would, in fancy words, be talked about as its trophic level. And toads are predators, but they’re predators on arthropods, so they eat bugs.

 

Mike Forstner [00:22:51] So, when we talk about trying to do management of habitat, we’re really managing bugs, because if there’s enough bugs and enough bug diversity, the toad’s likely to do well.

 

Mike Forstner [00:23:02] They are analogous to all of our amphibians in that they’re in water and in terrestrial habitats. So, they’re good environmental indicators for what the quality and the health of that habitat might be.

 

David Todd [00:23:20] Got you. Okay. That helps.

 

David Todd [00:23:23] So, I think you’ve given us a sense that these creatures are quite rare, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the presence and absence surveys that you’ve done over the years, and, you know, what sort of patterns and trends you’ve seen.

 

Mike Forstner [00:23:42] Well, we should probably start this with my wife’s family. She has all sisters. Given my lack of success with detecting toads on a regular basis, used to cynically nod and make comments about, “Sure, you’re out looking for toads. What are you really doing all night long?”

 

Mike Forstner [00:24:06] I can remember conducting a survey. This would have been 2000 or 2001. So again, not quite as far as stone tablets, but as we reach the Bronze Age of recent history, and a cold front came in, which stops, with the wind, my ability to detect the species a distance with an ear. And in my notes, it says something. I have it. I kept it around to indicate that you shouldn’t do dumb stuff.

 

Mike Forstner [00:24:37] It says, “3:04 A.M. The cold front has arrived. Very tired. Going home.” And then the pencil line drops off in a large squiggle that goes to the bottom of the line. And I don’t remember any of that.

 

Mike Forstner [00:24:54] Houston toads are not common. They are not abundant in anywhere that they are found, even when they were found widely in the state. You can get large choruses, which would be abundance on a night, but that is typically less than 10 or 15 nights of a year.

 

Mike Forstner [00:25:15] Houston toads are active, males chorus, to attract chicks. Right? They want the girls to appreciate them. So, they go and they trill at the pond edge. That advertisement call is only done when Houston toads know they want to do it. Which means that most of the time what you’re doing is you’re driving around in the dark, going, “Here, toad, here, toad”, and there are no toads.

 

Mike Forstner [00:25:42] However, we developed, really in collaboration with some of the original authors. We haven’t talked about how science works, but science is an ever cycle. You’re on a cycle of research, and then that cycle of research ends, usually replaced by new people and a new cycle of research works out.

 

Mike Forstner [00:26:02] One of the big advantages, when we talk about presence absence surveys for the toad, is a seeming disadvantage, in that we only knew about the toad beginning in the 1950s. But it translates to the authorities that worked with the toad in the ’70s and ’80s and the ’90s, before the most precipitous declines, were alive and still active in the time that I picked it up in the ’90s through to now.

 

Mike Forstner [00:26:32] So, most of those scientists have now passed away, but it enabled us to work with them on how they saw finding Houston toads.

 

Mike Forstner [00:26:46] It comes down to statistical power and an understanding of where the toad may be. It doesn’t do any good to look for toads by that big tower you guys light up on campus. There aren’t any.

 

Mike Forstner [00:26:57] But we can go to areas where they may be. And then you have to put in enough effort to detect them.

 

Mike Forstner [00:27:05] In the end, we were able to use both our database, but also the databases of others, to derive the statistics necessary to detect a toad at a pond if it’s going to be present.

 

Mike Forstner [00:27:20] We also then redeveloped new habitat guidelines. These were guided, the first primarily guided by Jim Dixon’s old data sets and ours, and the habitat by Dr. Jim Yantis’ original surveys with TPW, which discern the toad in a much wider array than what had been known before.

 

Mike Forstner [00:27:42] Leveraging both of those things allowed us to gain confidence in our ability to do Houston toad surveys that were both effective and could demonstrate that the toad was actually present with sufficient effort.

 

Mike Forstner [00:27:57] We also began a process in which we utilized not human ears, because humans are inherently fallible, but used audio recorders. And those audio recorders then provided both a durable record over time, but enabled us to effectively be at the pond every night of the year.

 

Mike Forstner [00:28:22] From leveraging both of those data sets, we can now set up when best we should survey. And I’m going to, well, toot the horn of my graduate students in that when I was drawing a line as I was trying not to die driving home, we would get Houston toads on roughly 20% of the nights that we went in the field.

 

Mike Forstner [00:28:47] Using the data on when they chorus and what the triggers in the environment are that best enable you to be there when they are, it’s now inverted. We now get Houston toads on 80% of the nights that we go to work.

 

Mike Forstner [00:29:03] Practically, I think that cumulatively, the pattern produced for Houston toads is just as dismal as you might expect. Houston toads have declined virtually everywhere in which they occur. And that decline continues, with the exception, really, of a couple of recovery tracts where the recovery efforts and stewardship are intense and the efforts are succeeding.

 

Mike Forstner [00:29:29] So, it’s not as depressingly intractable as it would have been if we had this conversation in 2011, but it’s still not a good scene if you look at it across the state.

 

David Todd [00:29:42] Okay. Well, this mention that you made of these audio recorders, makes me think about the interesting history, as I understand it, of the Houston toad and the use of sonograms. And, I guess some of the very first detections, I guess, used some of this equipment. And I was curious if you could talk a little bit about how sonograms and Houston toads might overlap or, you know, amphibians in general.

 

[00:30:11] So, it’s a good question in the way that it’s structured, because when I tell you that a Houston toad sounds different than a Gulf Coast toad, that may or may not mean anything to you. If I let you listen to each one, you would say, “Oh, yes, I hear it.” But it can be very different at a distance of a half mile. It can be different when there’s a bunch of them, versus one of them.

 

Mike Forstner [00:30:34] One of the ways that amphibian biologists and herpetologists, in general, have begun monitoring amphibians is by listening, because you can hear an amphibian chorus from a public roadway a mile away.

 

Mike Forstner [00:30:52] One of the first people to ever recognize that Houston toads were something different was a gentleman by the name of John Wottring. He was in Houston, and he and his friends, just as nerdy as my friends, but slightly older, were driving around Houston and developed really one of the first that I have heard of in Texas amphibian audio monitoring protocols. They would go listen to see what diversity they heard, and they kept hearing an amphibian that they didn’t recognize. And when they looked at what the animal was, it was a small toad with a black throat and a black speckled belly.

 

Mike Forstner [00:31:34] Well, the story from there goes quickly to that’s the eventual description for Houston toads and why they’re called “Houston”, not “Bastrop” or “Lost Pines” or “Leon County toads”. They’re called “Houston toads” because that’s where they were first found.

 

Mike Forstner [00:31:51] And in fact, those of you in Texas, Lord knows what this looks like over durable time. But if you drive with me in your mind on I-10 as you come in from the west, there is an Outdoor World of enormous size as you’re leaving Katy. And if you look directly across I-10 to the north, there’s a large subdivision, and that would have been the location where the original toads were found. But there wasn’t a subdivision there then.

 

Mike Forstner [00:32:21] So, we use sonograms. You can fast forward this in some ways. So, they, interestingly enough, in looking for Houston toads, derived some of the first audio survey methods. We utilize the unique features that are in Houston toads. When we make the recordings I talked about, they have an algorithm. In the current chain of events, there are multiple audio tools that you can use on your phone. If you hear a song and you don’t know the name of it, the machine on your phone will recognize it.

 

Mike Forstner [00:33:01] There’s even a game show now called “Shazam” that you can recognize what the song is and make money. I don’t know that I’d be any good at that, but throw some amphibian songs at me. I’ll make a buck.

 

Mike Forstner [00:33:16] So, what we use those for is they have unique features, and a sonogram isn’t different in many ways from the sonogram that you think of. If you were to view a child in utero. This is simply a patterning of the audio that’s displayed. We use unique features of that spectrum, being really frequency, pitch, duration to algorithmically recognize Houston toad calls.

 

Mike Forstner [00:33:49] But, in the last few years, we’ve published using – right now, AI is a nice big hype. By the time this is old news when you’re listening to it, AI may have taken over the world. We’ll see how that works out for you guys.

 

Mike Forstner [00:34:01] AI was very different in how it saw these calls. If you imagine how a toad choruses. He has a throat that extends and then vibrates along the exit of that air, and that makes the sound we hear. What we didn’t recognize, that AI saw, was that when a toad begins, it pops open its throat. It doesn’t gradually fill. And that uptick, the AI algorithm immediately recognized and is far more efficient than our previous algorithm in recognizing something a human didn’t pick up on, but mathematically, it’s obvious.

 

Mike Forstner [00:34:47] So those sonograms help us with distinguishing, practically, between Houston toads, other toads, but also between Houston toads and some arthropods. There are crickets that sound remarkably and irritatingly close to a Houston toad call, but they’re much, much longer.

 

David Todd [00:35:07] This is interesting. Really interesting. Thank you.

 

David Todd [00:35:10] So, tell me about another survey method that you may have used over the past. And that’s capture-mark-recapture type of field survey. Is that something you might be able to discuss?

 

Mike Forstner [00:35:22] So, if you think about managing … it’s Texas, let’s talk about managing your cattle herd. If you’re going to manage your cattle herd, one of the things you’ve got to know is how many cows and how many bulls you have. And do you have a bull? Because otherwise you’re not going to be making many more.

 

Mike Forstner [00:35:40] Ultimately, managing an endangered species, a really good way to do it would be somehow to magically pick up every Houston toad that’s in the woods, count them, and then count them again the same way next year and see what the trend was over time.

 

Mike Forstner [00:35:58] Because there’s no way practical to do that, we use a variety of trapping and hand-capture methods to collect Houston toads. And the same microchips that go into your dog, in a smaller format, can be used in a toad.

 

Mike Forstner [00:36:17] Statistics allow us to derive how many Houston toads are present by doing that across years.

 

Mike Forstner [00:36:24] So, we capture the animal, we mark it by putting a chip in it. We then recapture that animal at some point in the future. And over time, those recapture statistics allow us to derive the population size.

 

Mike Forstner [00:36:38] We did this and were able to publish what would be probably the first high-intensity survey method for Houston toads, revealing that there were at least a thousand of the individuals left when we did the study.

 

Mike Forstner [00:36:55] Unfortunately for us, wasn’t very long after that that the Bastrop County Complex Fire of 2011 rolled across that habitat patch.

 

Mike Forstner [00:37:05] You cannot know what you have if you don’t count it.

 

David Todd [00:37:10] Here’s another question for a Houston toad expert. And that is, say you’re hearing a chorus survey and you know that there are multiple individuals. How do you try to boil that down into knowing how many individuals?

 

Mike Forstner [00:37:28] So, there are two answers.

 

Mike Forstner [00:37:30] One in which you can walk up to the pond. And one in which you cannot walk up to the pond.

 

Mike Forstner [00:37:37] There was a nationwide effort to do amphibian monitoring out of USGS years ago, and we worked to develop a protocol that would enable citizen scientists to conduct these kinds of surveys to gain data at a large scale – kind of like trying to make frogs and toads sexy, like birds are, right. Nobody’s buying Swarovski binoculars for toad surveys, right? It’s not happening. And nobody’s paying to go to the Aleutians to see one. It’s just not how that works for toads.

 

Mike Forstner [00:38:14] So, we attempted to come up with something that might capture the imagination of parents and citizens that might be interested in doing this as an outing. What we found was, generally, if you are spatially aware in your hearing and the pond is big enough, up to about five individuals with 15 minutes of listening, you can detect that they are unique. You hear them come in differently. You know that spatially they’re not calling from the same location.

 

Mike Forstner [00:38:47] Between 5 and 10, it can get pretty dicey. If you can’t go to the pond, even my crew and myself will put down ten, because we can’t distinguish once it gets somewhere between seven, eight, nine, ten, because they start overlapping and they tend to be close together.

 

Mike Forstner [00:39:06] We can distinguish that there’s a bunch more than ten. And I’m sorry to tell you, it’s a bunch. That’s what we will put down: “20-plus”. And it simply means that that’s a very large chorus. It never pauses.

 

Mike Forstner [00:39:21] And then we were able to test that approach for how we were doing chorus magnitude, by being enabled to walk up to the ponds of citizens participating in the conservation program, so we could vet: I make the claim to you as you’re sitting with me, “That’s three.” And we walk up to the pond, and if there’s three, I win. And if there’s a whole bunch more than that, I fail.

 

Mike Forstner [00:39:46] It turns out that many factors feed into this, and I get to boldly claim we were generally right. If it was a cold night, we didn’t tend to be as right, because you would get males that didn’t call that were sitting at the pond. But I argue that that’s not quite what we were doing. We were counting the number of males we could hear calling, and that seemed to be fairly consistent.

 

Mike Forstner [00:40:11] What we do whenever we have landowner permission is physically walk up and count them. And that used to be fairly simple for me because there were dozens. We’re having some success on the recovery sites now, and it’s a very different problem when there’s 90. Because where did you start at the pond? Where did you end at the pond? Who hopped to the pond while you were walking around the pond?

 

Mike Forstner [00:40:38] But we still do our best to make sure we have an accurate count. And we now have 25 years of data for one site from which to draw using the same methods.

 

David Todd [00:40:51] So, I understand that some of the new methods of surveys use eDNA. And I was wondering how that works.

 

Mike Forstner [00:41:00] One of the difficulties: so, we tested this empirically. eDNA means environmental DNA. And I’m going to make you queasy version of that is if you don’t change your sheets often, or if you own a water bed, or if you remember water beds, that weird fluffy gray stuff that you would find when you took your water bed down to move it, is you, being shed in pieces every evening that you are in bed.

 

Mike Forstner [00:41:31] Well, we, an animal, shed skin all the time. eDNA turns out to be very useful when the organism is in the water. They’re now doing it by surveying swabs that collect air samples. The difficulty with eDNA turns out to be what is the false positive rate? And what is the false negative rate?

 

Mike Forstner [00:41:58] Houston toads are complicated because they’re a regulatory species. They are federally endangered, and there are laws on what finding them or not finding them result in for that piece of habitat.

 

Mike Forstner [00:42:13] A student of mine, Bill Keitt, did an exemplary study using eDNA where we could do something that most eDNA surveys cannot do. So, eDNA is used to detect bighead carp as an example. So, if you sample the water in a river and you find bighead carp eDNA, it means there are bighead carp somewhere in that river. But how far the water traveled with bighead carp mucus or poop is a different question from is there a bighead carp where you collected the water sample?

 

Mike Forstner [00:42:48] Bighead carp are in the river all the time. Houston toads aren’t. So, for the majority of the year, in a period that goes from, probably, August to November, there are never Houston toads or their tadpoles or their eggs in the ponds. So, Bill was able to sample the ponds when we knew there were no Houston toad that could be present. And then he was able to sample the ponds when we detected Houston toads for the first time, and then he was able to sample the ponds when we had tadpoles, so high-density tissue being shed. And we had chorusing ongoing.

 

Mike Forstner [00:43:32] We supplemented this by using a five-gallon bucket of water that didn’t contain eggs or tadpoles, and a five-gallon bucket that had tadpoles in it, and a five-gallon bucket that had an egg strand in it. And I will tell you that I did not, in that study, come up with an answer on how you could apply eDNA successfully, because we had ponds in which the five gallon, I’m sorry, we had a five-gallon bucket that had 1500 tadpoles in it that were driven for two hours before they got to us, so shake-n-bake tadpoles. And we did not always get that sample as a positive, even though it was a positive control. We also did not get water samples from the ponds positive, when we knew that there were thousands of Houston toad samples as tadpoles in the pond.

 

Mike Forstner [00:44:35] So I don’t consider it to be high reliability when the animal that you are seeking is ephemerally present in the habitat, or we would have to approach it by doing what we did with audio surveys – deriving what the power of that detection was, and then going from there.

 

Mike Forstner [00:44:55] Now we have successfully used it in a different endangered species in central Texas, and that is with Eurycea salamanders. They are present in the stream, or in the spring head and the spring flow, all of the time. And there where we sample, we had more reliability in the detections. But we don’t know how far away they were. So, we’ve got them in well samples, and there’s no spring, so far as we know, for dozens of miles in any direction.

 

Mike Forstner [00:45:28] And I don’t know what to tell you that means. Does that mean that there are Eurycea throughout the aquifer underground, and we simply don’t recognize that that is how they operate ecologically.

 

Mike Forstner [00:45:39] So eDNA could be a boon and a bane. It still requires doing a bunch of molecular lab work.

 

David Todd [00:45:46] Okay. Well, it really helps to understand a little bit more how you’ve monitored and surveyed and canvassed the environment to get that background to I guess the next question, which is, you know, the rarity of these creatures and maybe some of the trends. I understand that Houston toad was declared endangered in the very first sort of graduating class, in the early 70s, as an endangered species. And, you know, more recently has been declared critically endangered. And I was wondering if you could describe some of the trends that you’ve seen over time.

 

Mike Forstner [00:46:24] So, if you go backward to the idea of Wottring’s surveys and what they were finding, it was routine for them to encounter the Houston toad in Houston. And he and his colleagues were able to find Houston toads in the counties on either side of Houston as well. Now, they didn’t extend their surveys throughout the state. They believed at that time that the species was closely associated with what was a fairly unique pine forest and woodland habitat with sands that was around Houston for that period.

 

Mike Forstner [00:47:05] We have some ability to derive how many of them there were present in that area using museum specimens, but not quite in the way that you might think. It’s not that there are tons and tons of museum specimens from the period. They’re actually quite rare. But when those museum specimens were collected does give some level of insight.

 

Mike Forstner [00:47:33] As an example, samples collected by Wottring include samples from a chorus outside of Katy, Texas, near Houston, that were collected near the end of October. Noone alive that I have ever worked with has ever heard a Houston toad earlier than December. But if you think about Houston toad chorusing season, the more of them there are, the more likely that the ends of the period of chorusing stretch out further in time. So that, it’s anecdotal, but that fairly weak but nonetheless fairly discriminant piece of evidence would indicate that there were a lot of Houston toads then.

 

Mike Forstner [00:48:19] Another piece of evidence we have, again, comes from the shoulders of giants, on which we all stand when we do this work. And that is, Dixon and Dronen did a lot of work in Bastrop State Park in ’89 and ’90. And one of the things that stands out, we have actually published with Jim – a graduate student of mine [Melissa Jones] and Jim Dixon published a paper that looked at, “Do female Houston toads select for bigger males at a chorus or not?”, because our average size in this trend period since the ’90s has been smaller toad are found.

 

Mike Forstner [00:49:00] Well, we were able to do that because Jim Dixon’s students and he collected over a hundred amplectants. And amplexus is that weird position we have seen frogs in occasionally where the male grabs onto the back of the female and then doesn’t let go, and as soon as she starts to release eggs, he releases sperm. And there’s the fertilization for the egg strand. That thing is called amplexus. And if you ever want to nerd out, amphibians do you amplexus in a lot of wild and very strange ways.

 

Mike Forstner [00:49:35] When he did that on one night, at one pond, he was able to collect and measure the males and the females in amplexus for more than 100 amplecting pairs. And on the very next night, he went to another pond a couple of miles away, and did it again. So, we had hundreds of toads we could measure.

 

Mike Forstner [00:50:00] But the discriminant here again goes to what do we know from the past that we can extrapolate into the present. We now have choruses, at long last, that exceed 100 males at a pond. In general, our trend up to the last few years of success had always been consistent, where if you had ten males at a pond, you get one female in amplexus, on average.

 

Mike Forstner [00:50:28] Everything I tell you is a lie because there’s always violations of how this works and blah blah blah blah. Full disclosure.

 

Mike Forstner [00:50:35] But now that we have hundreds of males, the ratio seems to be about the same. We get a few more, but not dramatically. It’s about 15%, at the outside boundary, for the number of raw males at the chorus. For that to work for Jim Dixon’s ponds in 1989 and ’90, it meant there were thousands of males at those ponds, night after night. That is not a situation anyone has ever seen.

 

Mike Forstner [00:51:07] And we tease about it now. I probably shouldn’t say it out loud given this is university associated, but Houston toads call loudly. I am now concerned I’m going to end up with an OSHA violation because we got 100 toads at the pond screaming at my students all night long. And we’re there to listen, which makes it a difficult and intractable situation.

 

Mike Forstner [00:51:29] If you look outside of the few recovery sites that have net benefit in the last few years, Houston toad trend is down. In many ways, it’s down in a way that isn’t easily explainable.

 

Mike Forstner [00:51:44] I often say, and I haven’t said it yet, so here we go. Houston toads exist to make me look stupid. My wife is better at it, but only marginally.

 

Mike Forstner [00:51:55] In 2011, right after the fire, I was asked by a press member what I thought the future of the Houston toad was to be, and what I stated was Houston toads became functionally extinct on September the 4th, 2011, absent direct human intervention.

 

Mike Forstner [00:52:12] And three years later, we began surveying a patch of habitat north of Texas A&M in Robertson County. And over the next three years we did ridiculously intense surveys in that patch, and detected Houston toads over a 40 square mile area, so roughly the same size as the patch that was present in Bastrop before the complex fire in 2011.

 

Mike Forstner [00:52:39] And yet, in the years since, those numbers have dwindled again without a fire or a dramatic change to habitat.

 

Mike Forstner [00:52:47] So, there is some factor working in this.

 

Mike Forstner [00:52:51] If you examine Houston toads, the trend from 1950 to their listing in 1970, the trend from 1970 to the IUCN revision in ‘8, to the present, remains the same. We’re one bad year or one bad fire event away from extinction in the wild.

 

David Todd [00:53:21] Let’s talk about … I know that there are probably not definitive answers here, but maybe you can use your speculation powers. What do you think some of the big factors are in the toad’s decline over this course of time?

 

Mike Forstner [00:53:35] Well, there are some of the listeners that may remember a Li’l Abner cartoon in which Daisy asked Li’l Abner, “What’s wrong? Why is everything so difficult? Why is nature having such trouble?” And Abner looks over the hillside and there’s a vast mountain of garbage. And he says, “I think it’s us.”

 

Mike Forstner [00:53:57] So, in the end, either direct or indirect effects of anthropogenic changes in the habitat have led to where we are. I’ve said that, in fact, that the citizen contributing permit as a federal guideline in a Habitat Conservation Plan in Bastrop County, the Lost Pines Habitat Conservation Plan, is very clear on citizens and private individuals can contribute directly to the conservation recovery of the Houston toad because the Houston toad will live in your backyard, if it looks like Bastrop.

 

Mike Forstner [00:54:35] The reality is that very often unintentional mischief, unpermitted development has led to declines that make it more and more difficult.

 

Mike Forstner [00:54:47] I want you to imagine your 401(k). And now imagine that you’re getting toward retirement, and suddenly your 401(k) drops down to a few thousand dollars, 3 or $4000. Its ability to bounce back to where you can retire is far lower than when it was 3 or $400,000.

 

Mike Forstner [00:55:11] Toads are in the same boat. They had high numbers early. We mined the sand. We cut down every stick that we could so we could build Houston. We disrupted the habitat and they disappeared.

 

Mike Forstner [00:55:24] We have some evidence in Lee County, which is just north of Bastrop County, in which systematic disruption of what was an intact set of woodlands and forest went on beginning in 1999. And it was sufficient with about 11% disruption of contiguous forests, but a net increase in edge (so, that’s what happens when you cut down a forest, or you end up with bigger edges exposed on the remaining forest), that by 2005, what were hundreds of individual toads detected in Lee County went to a dozen. And now we don’t hear them there anymore at all.

 

Mike Forstner [00:56:07] So things go on where people aren’t maliciously attempting to get rid of Houston toads, or they’re not doing this thinking about the Houston toad. They’re just doing.

 

Mike Forstner [00:56:16] You could look at Bastrop County and you could look at highway 71, and there is continuing unpermitted development where people just go in, cut down forest and put up a building, or they put in an RV park. Those death-of-a-thousand-cut habitat events drive some of this.

 

Mike Forstner [00:56:37] But don’t forget we did things like introduce, Solenopsis invicta. We introduced red imported fire ants.

 

Mike Forstner [00:56:46] We have … Smokey the Bear is a federal criminal that should probably be incarcerated because he is personally responsible for amazing problems we face all day, every day. Today, Smokey the Bear and Bambi taught you that forest fires are bad. With that, we’ve put in a policy that prevented natural fire from removing understory and dead vegetation build-up, and in part, that contributes to the wildfire seasons we see out west. And don’t everybody yell at me about climate change. I know it’s a part, but we had to fire suppress those forests to get them to the fuel loads that do the insanity of the burns we get now.

 

Mike Forstner [00:57:32] We decrease the health of our forests by mismanagement and by not understanding the ecology of what we should be doing. We cut the habitat apart. We introduced fire ants.

 

Mike Forstner [00:57:47] We also introduced our presence on the landscape with garbage uncontrolled so that drove skunks, raccoons to higher numbers – mesocarnivores that are anthropogenically enhanced. They’ll take toads. We find them partially predated. Raccoons are, if anything, probably going to inherit the planet from us because they know that they can’t eat the dorsal surface of a toad because it’s toxic. So, they just eat them from the belly up.

 

Mike Forstner [00:58:19] When you consider all of those factors, these are called additive adult mortality. And Houston toads exist in a natural environment where that’s high anyway. And now, with additional additive mortality, they can’t ever quite get back on their feet.

 

Mike Forstner [00:58:37] And finally, we did one other thing. We published a paper that looks at … I’m going to give a Texas anecdote. When I was in high school, all the boys would drive around in their pickup trucks, and then they would find a canal bank somewhere, and they would park and sit on their tailgate and have their pretend-adult discussions about how to save the world.

 

Mike Forstner [00:58:59] And the girls would drive around in their pickup trucks. Now, again, this is rural south Texas. So, maybe it wasn’t the same in Dallas for you guys, but whatever. And the girls would drive by. And I assure you that if me and Freddy were sitting on a tailgate, they didn’t stop. They might honk and wave and keep going.

 

Mike Forstner [00:59:18] But if there were a few dozen boys standing around on pickup trucks, those girls felt like they could pull over. They were fine, and they’d come and talk to the boys, which usually meant that it got really quiet, really fast.

 

Mike Forstner [00:59:32] Houston toads aren’t different. Female Houston toads choose to go to choruses that have five or more males.

 

Mike Forstner [00:59:40] One of the things that people have done is every human being that buys a piece of rural land wants their own pond. Our net estimate is something like 4,200% more impounded water in Bastrop today than there was in 1980. I don’t know how bad it gets going backward, but it’s probably the same multiple.

 

Mike Forstner [01:00:03] So now, not only do we have a lot more ponds that can be randomly encountered by a male that then calls and never has buddies show up to help the chicks come by. But we have fewer and fewer ponds where the males can aggregate that draw the females to the pond because they feel safe, or that’s what they were evolutionary driven to do.

 

Mike Forstner [01:00:24] All of these features contribute. The difficulty is understanding why in otherwise intact habitat in a large patch, the decline has continued.

 

Mike Forstner [01:00:36] The diet study I just referenced, looks at whether or not part of this goes to competition with the common toad that’s now been moving northward, away from the coast and toward the Red River.

 

David Todd [01:00:52] You mentioned one factor that I’d love to hear you talk more about. And that’s the introduction, or the arrival of, red imported fire ants. How might that have affected the Houston toad?

 

Mike Forstner [01:01:06] Well, it’s interestingly coincident to a period of time. I mean, it’s funny. Fire ants now reach out past Del Rio, right? So, you can get fire ants on the banks of Amistad now, where when I began working the Rio Grande in the ’80s, there were no fire ants in Del Rio. So, the wave of fire ants moving westward going to be inhibited by the dry didn’t happen.

 

Mike Forstner [01:01:34] Fire ants have been moving out of what we think was the ports in New Orleans for a long time, but probably sometime in the teens to ’20s. And they probably reached Houston in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, coincident to a drought.

 

Mike Forstner [01:01:50] What we see, and you’re going to forgive me for “the everything I tell you is a lie”. The general answer is that fire ant waves move through amphibian and arthropod. Fire ants are bad for ants, and they’re bad for other bugs, too. A wave of fire ants moves through as an invasive wave. All of those organisms decline, and then find ways to cope with fire ants.

 

Mike Forstner [01:02:18] So, I would imagine that the fire ant moved through the areas that had Houston toads in a period that was potentially associated with a very impactful drought, and was yet another additive mortality factor.

 

Mike Forstner [01:02:33] Today, we don’t see as much of an effect. And we’ve tested it explicitly. Houston toads can tolerate lower densities of fire ants. And it may have been coincident to when the early researchers were doing this, that fire ants were a big problem in the Houston area, and that they were a big problem in the coastal prairies. And that led to some of the idea about what was impacting toads.

 

David Todd [01:03:01] And these fire ants, did they eat some of the prey that Houston toads would otherwise be chomping down on, or do they actually attack the toads?

 

Mike Forstner [01:03:13] They do both. So, I want anyone that’s ever been in Texas to imagine sitting on the grass in May or June, and then imagine the screaming realization that you’re sitting next to a fire ant mound, or I want you to imagine your children stepping in a fire mound and the noises that immediately ensue.

 

Mike Forstner [01:03:36] It’s no different for a toad. Fire ants tend to impact juvenile toads at the water’s edge. They are certainly active predators on arthropods, and will take all that they can.

 

Mike Forstner [01:03:47] Those things become increasingly important in times when it’s bad. As an example, in 2011, there’s a blurb, in, I think it’s in the New York Times, basically a follow-up on the fire. We would find in the worst of the drought of 2011, which would be analogous to the drought that we saw in the ’50s, Houston toads would persist in their burrows, and they would reach some level where they were literally desiccating to death, and they would make an attempt to get out. And they would often encounter fire ants.

 

Mike Forstner [01:04:26] And what we can’t reconstruct is everything would have been rare for prey then. Were they encountering fire ants right after they died, where their deaths contributed to by fire ants? These we can’t disarticulate because we weren’t able to see it, but it certainly appears that fire ants can still be relevant. But again, like your 401(k), it comes down to how many dollars are in the account. How many toads do we have in the landscape and how do we manage them?

 

David Todd [01:04:56] So, you mentioned a couple of times the role of droughts, both in the 1950s and then this historic one in 2011, that was briefer, but I guess very severe. What’s the impact of dry weather on a Houston toad?

 

Mike Forstner [01:05:13] If you look backward across the record, it looks like the 1950s drought contributed directly to the extirpation of the animal around Houston. That was coincident. It’s another additive mortality factor.

 

Mike Forstner [01:05:26] So we have observed in the period of time since ’99 that we don’t see Houston toads going to the ponds, if we don’t get periods where we have rainfall in the spring. They will eventually show up. But if we then don’t get subsequent rainfalls that follow up, the juveniles emerge and often don’t do well as they try to move away from the pond. They desiccate and die.

 

Mike Forstner [01:05:54] Probably the reconstruction of evidence in decline: Dr. Andy Price had studied the Houston toad at Bastrop State Park for the longest period up until just a few years ago, when the dataset we began in 2000 achieved the same duration. When he was doing that study, 1993 was more or less in the middle of it. And he had hundreds of toads detected in 1990, 1991, 1992. Even in 1993, he sees a large number of toads. But ’93 has this weird spring and summer flash drought. It will be difficult to reconstruct in a future hearing of this, but for those of us that lived in Austin last summer, all of you remember – 110 days above 100, 11 days above 110 straight.

 

Mike Forstner [01:06:54] ’93 was analogous in how dry it was, and there appeared to be an immediate decline in the number of toads seen subsequent – in ’94, ’95, and ’96.

 

Mike Forstner [01:07:10] For us, we have areas that we are active and have studied since 2000 that in 2011 were not affected by the fire that occurred in Bastrop County. But the fire also affected some of that tract. And we see Houston toads’ immediate decline in and outside of the fire zone. In 2012, we see a fair number of toads, but the decline after 2012 is fairly precipitous. It looks like it’s yet another factor that they’re not well adapted to.

 

Mike Forstner [01:07:50] I had somebody ask me… Oh my God, what’s it called? “Winter Storm Uri” is what I’m calling the name of it. And I could be wrong. But in 2021, it got cold for real in Texas for the first time in about 27 years. And it’s interesting to look at what the state climatologist’s graphics do, because we used to get winter storms that were analogous to that in Austin and in San Marcos with fair regularity, once a decade. And we just got a period where we didn’t get one, and all of us freaked completely out when it was below freezing for two days in a row. It was the apocalypse.

 

Mike Forstner [01:08:32] Now, when you consider that we planned badly for those events happening, and it certainly was serious, people died. There were direct impacts to families, the whole nine yards. One of the questions I got after that was, “Oh my gosh, what happened to the Houston toad?” I think one of the best answers to that is that these are called the near-Arctic toads. There was still snow on the ground in Bastrop when they came out to chorus. I think they were saying, “It’s about time you turn the air conditioner back on.”

 

Mike Forstner [01:09:08] But they did very well that year and the year, obviously the last three years, the numbers have simply dramatically increased. Maybe that storm had something to do with it as well.

 

David Todd [01:09:20] This is all great.

 

David Todd [01:09:22] I’m curious about something. You. You mentioned earlier – that these toads, small as they are, can travel many, many miles, in their dispersals. And I’m curious if collisions with cars, or the reverse – cars’ collisions with them, and the whole sort of issue of road ecology is a factor in the Houston toad’s trend.

 

Mike Forstner [01:09:46] It is. We work closely with TXDOT to minimize and avoid creating blockages. Whenever a road is revised in Houston toad habitat, we do things like bridge or large culverts to allow them to pass underneath. TXDOT has a long history of doing that.

 

Mike Forstner [01:10:04] There’s a Japanese sitcom in which the Toad Tunnels of Love was highlighted. These were a set of culverts that were installed with TXDOT and Jim Dixon, a long time ago in a land far away when 21 was expanded. And they had exactly the right idea. But they didn’t understand the ecology of a toad sensorium to know that it had to be a wide and fairly air-exchanging culvert to allow the toads to hop underneath the road for a mate.

 

Mike Forstner [01:10:38] In the state of Texas, we’re doing the same thing with ocelots. Move the animals under the roadway – prevent collisions. When we did a genetic evaluation, we were able to identify that major roads in Bastrop created some level of disruption in the clan families of genetic Houston toads that were present in the county. We are actively working on major roads to make sure any revision goes on changes that.

 

Mike Forstner [01:11:07] And in Austin County, TXDOT worked with a private landowner group on a small road, not even a state road, to try to increase the culvert size and divert the toads from crossing directly across that road and being impacted.

 

Mike Forstner [01:11:22] And they do it with turtles too. Right? It’s the same thing.

 

Mike Forstner [01:11:26] Your listeners may not be aware of the fact that for salamanders, there are areas in New Mexico and there are areas in the northeastern parts of the U.S. where salamanders move en masse toward a breeding pond. And those breeding ponds are much more restricted than they are in our area, and it can actually get to the point that the highways put up warning signs about the loss of traction because of the thousands of dead salamanders that are in the region crossing the road on the drainage. Again, revising those to get the animals to move under the roadway is the smartest thing to do for amphibians.

 

David Todd [01:12:09] I see, as I look at my little clock here, that we are running short on time, and I want to make sure we don’t miss some really important things that I’d love to hear from you about. And so, I thought, with your permission, if we could just sort of cut to talking about some of these conservation strategies. I think you mentioned some of these maneuvers with roads. You know, maybe we can talk a little bit about population supplementation, which I’ve heard, when we spoke earlier, is a big strategy, a big tactic for, trying to bring the toads back.

 

Mike Forstner [01:12:49] So, if you consider the arithmetic of toads as an investment, the survivorship of an egg to an adult toad is very small. It’s 0.001 or less. And if you think about making a contribution to your 401(k) and multiplying the number by .001, you will see that you get to retire when you’re 6890. Houston toads aren’t different and amphibians in general have operated much like most amphibians – a lot of babies up front, few of them survive to be adult.

 

Mike Forstner [01:13:34] The difficulty is then how do you manage that, if you have a lot of juvenile mortality and adults don’t live all that long in the wild because adult mortality is fairly high?

 

Mike Forstner [01:13:45] I often think about Houston toads analogously to salmon. The adults get to the breeding fields, in my case, the breeding ponds, one time. And we never see them again. The reproductive effort on females is huge. The reproductive effort for males is huge.

 

Mike Forstner [01:14:04] So the idea of supplementing a population, in Texas, one thing that happens that some of the listeners may have done themselves or with their children is you can go below Canyon Lake, and you can catch trout. They release them in the Guadalupe, where the cold water exit is. And if you fish the Guadalupe, you’re not going to catch rainbow trout. It’s not what you would go there to catch, except for after you’ve released all of these trout. That doesn’t mean you don’t have some holdovers. And the lucky guy that catches a 3-pound rainbow, or brown, for that matter.

 

Mike Forstner [01:14:46] When we think about amphibian conservation, a model in which individuals are reintroduced to unoccupied habitat, or individuals are released after you offset some of that juvenile mortality. So, even eggs are eaten. Herons, in particular, seem to think that toad eggs are like caviar – egrets, herons, night herons in particular. We saw it right after the fire. When there’s no vegetated cover, those egg strands would be detected by us and be gone the next morning. And you would see these nice tri footprints that walked up to the strand, paused for a moment, gulped down an egg strand, and went on its way.

 

Mike Forstner [01:15:34] So, what we do is several things. We put egg strands into protective mesh bags that prevent birds or other predators from getting to the eggs, even arthropods. Then, in some ways, we’ve offset the additional additive mortality from egg to tadpole. The tadpoles are then released into the pond and we have changed the arithmetic.

 

Mike Forstner [01:16:08] We are able to enable adding, we can take egg strands from a pond. We can let those at Houston Zoo, the Fort Worth Zoo, the Dallas Zoo, or the Federal Fish Hatchery grow to be adults. We can use the adults from that natal pond to create a new egg strand. And in captivity, they can do that every year and live for four years. So instead of getting the reproductive output one time, we can get four times that.

 

Mike Forstner [01:16:39] Those egg strands can then be put back into the natal pond – that’s the parents came from. And we bolster the population just like we bolster rainbow trout so you can catch them.

 

Mike Forstner [01:16:50] Right now, the paradigm in science is that it doesn’t work, that it has never worked. It turns out that at least for the primary recovery site on toads, not only does it work, it’s a fairly dramatic result.

 

Mike Forstner [01:17:09] We had to change up and adapt the ways that we did it. So, what your mom told you about don’t put all your eggs in one basket is not correct for Houston toads. Turns out if you put a lot of Houston toad eggs into one pond, versus putting one or two or three egg strands in a lot of ponds, the net return on investment is higher by putting all of your eggs in one basket. We think they swamp the predators. They come out and there’s too many juveniles to be eaten by the predators entirely. So, more of them survive. We sate the predators.

 

Mike Forstner [01:17:49] The outcome of that, in our work in Bastrop is dramatic. So all of those zoos, Parks and Wildlife, Fish and Wildlife, my guys, the Boy Scouts Capital Area Council (I can link you back to Austin again without teasing you about the tower), and the combined efforts of Bastrop County, my folks, etc., has resulted in the number of Houston toads in the period using the same methods on the same site from 2000 to 2005 was 100 or 200 a year.

 

Mike Forstner [01:18:26] From 2005, you might remember that the drought that you referred to is less than the ’50s, really began in 1999. It just got worse and worse and worse, just like it did through ’56. From 2006 to the fire in 2011, those numbers dropped down to dozens.

 

Mike Forstner [01:18:46] And from 2011 to 2015, they dropped down again to single digits quite often.

 

Mike Forstner [01:18:53] In 2024, we detected 700-plus Houston toads on the primary recovery site.

 

Mike Forstner [01:19:01] That number has not been a number I ever thought we’d see. And it’s led to a new problem, which is OSHA complaints about noise damage to your hearing. It’s led to the fact that you can work, and document 40 Houston toads in a night, but you’re going to need 12 people to document 200 toads in a night. So, I have brand new problems that I didn’t expect to have because we’re winning.

 

Mike Forstner [01:19:25] The result seems to indicate that population supplementation can work, but it has to be at a scale that addresses the mathematics. Which means that if you’re going to get a Houston toad adult back, that’s more than 10,000 eggs that go out at a given time. And if you want hundreds back, it’s hundreds of thousands or millions of eggs.

 

David Todd [01:19:52] Okay. Tell me how much time we have before you need to flee.

 

Mike Forstner [01:19:58] You can push me another 20. Go ahead.

 

David Todd [01:20:00] 20 minutes. Okay.

 

David Todd [01:20:02] So, one of the things that I think is, is interesting, is there are people who work on different kinds of species. Some are very charismatic. You think of a bison or a bald eagle. And then there are other people who’ve focused on smaller creatures, that aren’t considered as charismatic. And I’m wondering if you’ve found that that is a challenge, or if it’s not really relevant to your work.

 

Mike Forstner [01:20:32] I’d be far more manly if I worked on grizzlies. Right? I mean, it’d be a whole different story. No one looks at you when you say, “Oh, I was out surveying for toads last night”, with anything but a mix of disdain and disbelief.

 

Mike Forstner [01:20:51] That said, I have worked on the charismatic megafauna. Right? We’ve worked on orangutans and chimps, and leaf monkeys and marmosets, tamarins. We’ve worked on non-charismatic, but nonetheless, megafauna. We’ve done work on crocodiles. We’ve done work on animals that people don’t like, but still have conservation prioritization.

 

Mike Forstner [01:21:21] And when I naively stepped into Houston toads, it’s kind of funny to think about it. The way I used to tell this story is different from the way I would tell it today.

 

Mike Forstner [01:21:31] I stepped into Houston toads having done work on charismatic megafauna, working with rhinos, working, I mean, all the things you think about as conservation priority targets that you go to the zoo and you see. And took the job at what’s now Texas State, picked up working on Houston toads with this very wide-eyed belief that this would be easy.

 

Mike Forstner [01:22:02] Houston toads don’t eat your children. Houston toads don’t climb in your house at night and take your baby out of its crib like tigers do in Asia. Houston toads don’t require hundreds of thousands of intact acres of primary forest in order to be supportive of the troops of primates that are there. They also don’t get human diseases. So they’re not like chimpanzees or orangutans that have to worry about getting ours passed over.

 

Mike Forstner [01:22:38] The interesting thing was, I thought that Houston toads would live in your backyard. Because they would live in your backyard, a sensible series of avoidance and minimization measures would enable conservation work that could make strides forward if we had the data to drive making those decisions.

 

Mike Forstner [01:22:59] Yeah. So, turns out it was a whole lot harder than I thought. But when I look at it now, a decade past the worst of it, for the moment, anyway, we’re making a difference. It has recovered. All of the things: I’ll toot everybody’s horn. There is a IUCN attaboy list, attagirl list, that is the “Reversing the Red”. Red list species are those species on their way to extinction. There is a list of those species that are receiving conservation benefits and changing the trend. Houston toads were acknowledged as one such program two years ago.

 

Mike Forstner [01:23:47] And if you look at what Houston toads have going for them at the moment: you want a conservation program that involves science. I try. Others do too. You want a conservation program that involves the local people living where the animal occurs. We have it in some of the counties. You want a program that engages the regulatory agencies and the zoological parks. All of those things are in place.

 

Mike Forstner [01:24:14] So, in some ways it should be an oxymoron that we’re succeeding. But indeed, it seemed very unlikely. And now that we are succeeding, it’s a matter of let’s not break what’s finally working. That can be just as difficult.

 

Mike Forstner [01:24:31] What I do not know from where we are, is how to extrapolate the success that we’ve had at a county level to be something that affects toads in their historic range, everywhere that they occur. We have published papers that evaluate using historical museum samples, that the historic range was probably larger than what we have even documented. That paper came out a month ago.

 

Mike Forstner [01:24:58] So, we know that the net trend has been bad for a long time. We have now documented ways that you can offset that trend. What habitat recovery and manipulation to remove fire suppression, to increase herbaceous, so plant diversity, and how that increases arthropods. We see larger toads back at the pond than what we saw in the early part. All of the things that you would hope happen are now viable.

 

Mike Forstner [01:25:27] If you think that’s going to make someone not tease me by bringing me a stuffed toad, or holding up a bull frog leg in a picture and saying, “How do they taste?”, you have vastly underestimated the state in which we reside. It will always be Texas.

 

Mike Forstner [01:25:46] I think that when you think about the regulatory efforts, I believe something that is different about Houston toads, and it’s possible that this is speculatively self-congratulatory and deluded. We have seen, we have sought and successfully developed measures in which you’re building your house that prevent you from killing toads during the process so that they can live in your backyard when you’re done. If you’re going to build a pipeline so that (I mean, I drive a truck; I kill and eat Bambi)… All of these things that are not departed from things that are quite normal in Texas, but that there are mechanisms by which are impacts on Houston toad habitat, can minimize how big a footprint they cause and how bad it is.

 

Mike Forstner [01:26:41] Some of those are fairly small. All of us are well acquainted and enjoy the heck out of TXDOT roadway repairs and new construction. If you don’t believe me, drive from Seguin to San Antonio sometime soon. Drive in San Antonio any time soon. Go to Austin ever. If you do those things, what you will learn is that those roadways disrupt the areas along both sides.

 

Mike Forstner [01:27:13] TXDOT’s one of the largest landowners in our state. When you do that, you don’t want erosion. So, what used to be the way that was approached is we would put invasive grasses down along the roadway. TXDOT doesn’t do that in Houston toad habitat anymore. They now put native grasses down. We have gotten a mix, in collaboration with the seed companies, that works in rapidly establishing to prevent erosion. Little changes, big effects downstream. We modify the course of events now and in 20 years, we reap the benefits.

 

Mike Forstner [01:27:51] But no, they’re never going to stop teasing me about working on toads. Even my colleagues from the early years go, “You work on what now?”

 

David Todd [01:28:01] So, you’ve worked on many different species, but it sounds like, when we’ve spoken before, that you’ve sometimes been a little bit skeptical or critical of this single-species focus. And, have, I think, said that maybe looking at things in a more holistic way may be more productive. And I was wondering if you could sort of run that out and explain what you had in mind.

 

Mike Forstner [01:28:27] So if you think about the work we’ve done with Houston toads, there’s a remarkable conjunction, even since you reached out to me, in exactly what I mean. And that is tricolored bats. So, this is a bat species that, because of White Nose Syndrome, is now going to be listed as an endangered species. It is coincident in Houston toad habitat. The successes we have had in Houston toad habitat recovery are likely beneficial to tricolored bats. It’s a twofer.

 

Mike Forstner [01:29:04] So, I think that if we were able to look at the kinds of activities on the Texas landscape that maintain healthy habitats, we would end up being able to maintain not just one, but multiple.

 

Mike Forstner [01:29:19] A great example of this, again, going back toward Houston, is the Cook’s Branch Conservancy. There are more red-cockaded woodpeckers on a tract that used to be an oldfield today, than almost anywhere else. It’s remarkable. And it was the vision of a single family deciding, “We want to bring back what habitat was here.” And it’s a difficult thing to do because they weren’t thinking on a “What am I going to have next year? What am I going to have at the end of ten years?” They were thinking about what they were going to have at the end of 50 years.

 

Mike Forstner [01:30:02] All you have to do is look at anything that we do, and you will recognize that we are really bad at thinking about anything that is more than an election cycle further out. If it’s more than four years, it’s not time to be thinking about it.

 

Mike Forstner [01:30:16] But it’s been valuable to me to work with our Texas Highways Department because they are planning infrastructure projects out ten years. They’re looking at development, and it enables making actions today that enable the data and eventually how the design works that I think is valuable.

 

Mike Forstner [01:30:36] So, I think if we were able to do that using groups of taxa, we would benefit many things and offset problems that are sudden, the way LCRA is facing a problem with that fatmucket, the mussel just being listed in our Central Texas rivers.

 

David Todd [01:30:52] So, I think you were talking about the Mitchell family at Cook’s Branch and this ability to think many years in advance, or TXDOT, I guess, having to think and plan and fund ahead of time.

 

David Todd [01:31:05] I think that when we spoke before, you said that sometimes one of the hardest pieces of conservation is it that there’s a kind of a salvage aspect of it, you know, there’s a last-moment rescue that’s requested. And I was curious if you could talk about that in the context of Houston toads and what’s expected and what’s possible.

 

Mike Forstner [01:31:29] So, it would have been far easier to make strong strides toward Houston toads benefit in the 1970s or ’80s, thinking about habitat, thinking about how we might work with landowners, thinking about how that might develop, than it was when we got started doing what we were doing by the time you got to the 1990s. By then, in some ways it was already too late.

 

Mike Forstner [01:31:53] I worry about it for a lot of organisms, because there is no effective funding to go look for something that’s not already on the endangered species list. Yes, there’s some, everything I tell you is a lie, blah, blah, blah. But there are target species where we recognize there may be a problem, but there’s no comprehensive mechanism by which funds are allocated to understand diversity in ways that enable getting the information well enough ahead of time to offset strong declines.

 

Mike Forstner [01:32:26] Texas tortoise is a good example. Texas tortoise has always done well in Texas, despite every other tortoise that’s in that genus in the U.S. being on the endangered species list. Texas tortoise is not listed. It’s not listed in part because it has a range that goes into Mexico, which is bigger than the other two, three. And it’s also not listed because Texas remained a rural, ranching community where most of those tortoises occur.

 

Mike Forstner [01:32:58] Well, that’s no longer true. The exploration in the Eagle Ford sits right over the best habitat the animal had, and the declines have been precipitous, where we, again, in tens of thousands of survey miles detect ten. Whereas in a thousand survey miles, we detected hundreds. These continue to happen, but it’s very difficult to plan ahead unless there’s a regulatory, recognized mechanism that enforces that compliance.

 

Mike Forstner [01:33:31] And funds work the same way. Funds flow where the need is and outlining a strong need where there’s not already a listing package is very difficult.

 

Mike Forstner [01:33:41] It’s changing, but it’s changing too slow to make a difference.

 

Mike Forstner [01:33:44] There’s a book (I’m not making a plug for the book) – it’s a good book, in the thought that went into the title. The internals of the book aren’t quite as in-depth, and that is Saving a Million Species”.

 

Mike Forstner [01:33:57] What my students and my grandchildren are going to face is triaging not hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of taxa, that are going to be affected over the next 30 years from changes that can no longer be interrupted. And those animals are not, as they were at the last big shift that we had, able to move strongly north or south to escape changes that happen in temperature, regime and seasonality. It is going to be interesting times.

 

David Todd [01:34:35] So looking, and the future is I guess sort of iffy always, I was hoping that you might do a little retrospective work with us before we run short on time. And first of all, when you look back on your career today in wildlife research and conservation, what stands out as important that you’ve learned along the way?

 

Mike Forstner [01:35:02] Mentorship: the ability to convey information to those minds that want it, that can leverage everything that you’ve done wrong so they can go do it wrong in a brand new way. But the process of science is a weird thing. Your job is to prove the people that are your heroes wrong in some detail to advance the field. Your job is to go out and do work that you know, somehow or another, you’re going to miss a fundamental understanding or some concept you weren’t even aware existed, and you’re going to be shown wrong.

 

Mike Forstner [01:35:39] So, for a nerdy kid thinking about high school, being rejected by every ask for a date that happened to you, you’re a perfect scientist. Man, woman, or child, you were predestined for the same kind of constant failure that goes into what we do.

 

Mike Forstner [01:35:58] I think that I am amazed at how big data has enabled us to make decisions, and then how we’re able to leverage technology to simplify some of the work. But I am just as dismayed by how that has coincidentally led to more and more people choosing not to be uncomfortable.

 

Mike Forstner [01:36:22] It’s funny, we talked about influences early in life. Marlin Perkins: it’s probably not a name a lot of people know. Marlin sat in the tent and drank his martini while Jim chased the giant armadillo down. I remember watching those and thinking I could be Jim. What’s a martini?

 

Mike Forstner [01:36:43] The concept in how this works is that I remember what it was like for me and how difficult it was to find people who were willing to invest, and how weird the things I think are important are. And being able to be someone who can do that for the student that comes in and says, “I really want to do this”, is a benefit that was unexpected.

 

Mike Forstner [01:37:07] In the end, I believe that I am paying forward the gifts my mentors chose to give, and I’m going to do it as long as they’ll let me do it. Right? Stumbling up the hill, whatever.

 

Mike Forstner [01:37:18] But the context reality is that almost everything everybody tells you is horsepucky. When we know the answer to something, it’s almost certain to be wrong. And that your job is to figure out how it’s wrong. Not that they were trying to get it wrong, but then what they’re being wrong means about what happened.

 

Mike Forstner [01:37:42] And in Houston toads, that was a lot of it. In the end, assumptions that were made about Houston toads turned out to not be true. And in part, no one constantly revises what they think they know, because for all of us, that’s a very painful process. That’s how to bruise your ego until there’s nothing left.

 

Mike Forstner [01:38:03] And yet, I work very diligently to make sure that everyone around me is the antithesis of a sycophant. It makes me want to strangle them on a regular basis, but they keep me from thinking I know anything. And then there’s the Houston toad, which does it really well too.

 

Mike Forstner [01:38:23] I think that there’s probably nothing more important than understanding that we do a crappy job of linking the importance of wildlife and diversity in natural habitats back into the lives of TikTok and coloring your poodle. It’s a very different world from what’s inside your phone. And I think that that’s a difficult thing that we have not yet overcome.

 

David Todd [01:38:47] Well, speaking of trying to connect these animals as some kind of value that maybe, you know, supersedes even TikTok, when you think of a Houston toad or some other organism that you’ve studied, how do you see them as valuable? I mean, some people, I think, look at ecological issues, others, it’s ethical questions. Some people, it’s very personal. Some people, it’s spiritual. What is it for you when you think about these animals that you’ve studied and cared about?

 

Mike Forstner [01:39:18] So, if you engage with any of these projects, one of the things that these animals are able to do is to demonstrate that the habitats in which they live are healthy. Houston toads were screaming in their silence that the forests of Bastrop were no longer healthy and we didn’t pay enough attention. And the resulting catastrophe burned thousands of homes, killed people, lost billions of dollars in damage, and they were screaming in their voices, failing all of those years.

 

Mike Forstner [01:39:58] I think that wildlife represents a way to see that what we’re doing is resilience installation. We’re living on the urban wildland interface in Texas. We have this underlying mentality that we are on the edge of the frontier. That ain’t been true for a long time.

 

Mike Forstner [01:40:14] And at the same time, we retain that as part of our cultural identity. We need to remember that that requires as much investment as your new iPhone.

 

Mike Forstner [01:40:26] I make the argument in Bastrop with landowners who are like, “Why do I care about the Houston toad?” In the end, the Houston toad is what keeps Bastrop looking like the Bastrop you wanted to live in. It prevents it from looking like downtown Austin. It prevents it from being neighborhoods without trees, streets without end, and houses without any differences. It establishes a framework in which nature lives with you, which I think is better.

 

Mike Forstner [01:40:56] But we have to pay attention to what it tells us.

 

Mike Forstner [01:40:58] I think that’s true for all of the conservation wildlife projects. I don’t believe that everyone is ever going to see value in wildness or in wilderness or in wildlife, but there’s a strong presence in Texas, and my choice to live where I do and work where I do is partially based in an underlying theme in Texas, that native Texas matters.

 

Mike Forstner [01:41:24] Houston toads are native Texans. They deserve a shot too.

 

David Todd [01:41:29] Well, well said. Is there anything you’d like to add before you run to your next obligation?

 

Mike Forstner [01:41:37] No. Simply, thank you. It’s difficult to consider trying to sum up what we’ve done in a way that a casual reviewer that’s interested is going to find it of any interest. My hope is that at least I didn’t bore the people that listened through this or read through it.

 

David Todd [01:41:56] Not boring at all. Very interesting. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

 

Mike Forstner [01:42:02] You enjoy this? I can’t imagine shepherding all of these cats.

 

David Todd [01:42:10] It’ll be fun. It always is. And, I really enjoyed visiting with you. Thank you.

 

Mike Forstner [01:42:16] Sure.

 

David Todd [01:42:16] All right. I’m going to turn it off.