{"id":74940,"date":"2025-06-02T07:59:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T14:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=74940"},"modified":"2025-06-09T08:29:18","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T15:29:18","slug":"humans-of-nau-trevor-ritland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/humans-of-nau-trevor-ritland\/","title":{"rendered":"Humans of NAU: Trevor Ritland"},"content":{"rendered":"

A childhood obsession kindled by his father’s stories took\u202f<\/span>Trevor Ritland<\/span><\/b>, assistant director of communications for student affairs, and his twin brother on an epic journey through the cloud forests of Costa Rica in search of an elusive toad that was discovered in 1964 and vanished more than 30 years ago. Their discoveries and experiences are now part of \u201cThe Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.\u201d\u202f Find out more about Ritland\u2019s book and how he balances writing with his job at NAU.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What brought you to NAU?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, after spending two years in Costa Rica after college, I wanted to come back to the United States to pursue my master’s degree. NAU’s communication graduate program offered an emphasis in documentary studies, which sounded like a great way to keep working on some of the environmental stories I’d grown interested in in Costa Rica. It ended up being a great program, and my wife and I fell in love with Flagstaff and NAU\u2014we both got jobs at NAU, and we’ve been here ever since.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell me about \u201cThe Golden Toad.\u201d<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ritland<\/a>This was a story I originally heard from my father, who taught college biology and had traveled in the tropics: a bright orange toad that was only known to exist on one mountaintop in Monteverde, Costa Rica, that would appear for a few weeks at the start of the rainy season, then disappear for the rest of the year. Biologists observed thousands of them every season\u2014then, from one year to the next, they vanished completely. Nobody knew it at the time, but their disappearance was the start of a global amphibian extinction crisis\u2014one that is still playing out today. We can learn a lot from these extinctions: about the mechanisms of global pandemics, about climate change and about ecological resilience in a changing world. The book follows my twin brother Kyle’s journey to solve the mystery of the missing golden toads and my search for remnant populations of the lost species\u202fdeep in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. It’s a book about grief and hope, searching for survivors and making peace with ghosts.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What inspired you to write this book?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I lived in Costa Rica for two years after college, in the same little mountain town that the golden toads had once made famous. When I was there, I heard a different version of the story than the one that was printed in my college textbooks. Most reports attributed the last sighting of the golden toads to an American\u00a0biologist in 1989, but there was a local naturalist in Monteverde who claimed a later sighting: He had seen golden toads in 1991, two years after they were supposed to be extinct. In almost 30 years, he had not returned to the place where he had seen them\u2014no one had. The possibility that this iconic species could still be out there kept me up at night, and he agreed to return with us to search for the lost golden toads. I wanted to tell the story from a local perspective, acknowledging all of the local knowledge and grassroots conservation work that the extinction of the golden toad inspired in Monteverde. Originally, this started as a documentary film, my thesis project for my master’s program here at NAU, but there was so much of the story that we couldn’t tell in a 30-minute film. The book is our attempt to give the story back to Monteverde, to let the local voices tell their stories and to encourage people to appreciate everything we still have left before it disappears.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ritland<\/a>Can you share a fun memory of the journey you and your twin brother took while doing research for the book?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

W<\/span>e were all set to hike back to the remote spot where the golden toads were last seen when we found out that my wife wouldn’t be able to join us. She is Costa Rican and was going to be our primary translator for the trip, since the local biologists and rangers we were traveling with didn’t speak much English. My Spanish was pretty rusty after several years in the United States, and my brother Kyle didn’t know how to say much more than who he was and how he was doing. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So we were pretty concerned\u2014but then, while watching \u201c<\/span>Jaws\u201d <\/span>to distract ourselves from our impending misadventure, we realized that we were the same age that Spielberg was when he filmed\u202f\u201c<\/span>Jaws\u201d\u2014a notoriously disastrous <\/span>shoot. We decided that if Spielberg could survive making \u201c<\/span>Jaws<\/span>,\u201d we could survive our search for the golden toad. At least we were on dry land!\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During our search for the golden toad, we made another accidental discovery: a rare frog called the narrow-lined treefrog\u202f(<\/span>Isthmohyla angustilineata)<\/span><\/i>, with fewer than 250 individuals believed to exist in the wild. It had never been observed in that area before, and it was another species that had almost disappeared during the global amphibian decline in the 1980s and 1990s. Finding that frog in that location gave us so much hope for what else might be out there, unobserved and unnoticed, but alive!<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Trevor<\/a>What is your favorite way to spend a day off?<\/span><\/b>\u202f<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A year ago, I would have said “writing!” But nowadays, it is spending time with my 9-month-old daughter, Amelia, my wife, Pri, and our dog, Indie (though I’ll still sneak in a little time for writing, looking for frogs and riding my bike here and there).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What is your favorite childhood memory?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking for salamanders with my parents and my brother around the waterfalls of the Southeast. I grew up in the foothills of South Carolina, which is a global hotspot of salamander biodiversity. Today, there’s a disease that’s threatening to wipe out salamanders the same way that the golden toads disappeared. I hope that we can find a way to protect the salamanders so that I can show them to my daughter someday, the same way my parents showed them to me.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What are three items on your bucket list?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Ritland<\/a>Writing this book was on my bucket list for a long, long time, so it’s nice to cross that off the list.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

1) I want to show my daughter Monet’s water lily paintings at the Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie in Paris.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

2) I want to write a book about harlequin frogs (<\/span>Atelopus<\/span><\/i>),\u00a0Picasso’s harlequin paintings and the connection between art and nature.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

3) I want to ride my bike from Canada to Mexico along the trail of the monarch butterfly migration to find their overwintering site in the oyamel fir forests before they’re gone.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species\u201d<\/span> will be released on Tuesday, June 17. Bright Side Bookshop will host a free <\/span>release celebration<\/span><\/a> on June 17 at 6 p.m. Flagstaffians can preorder the book through Bright Side Bookshop or online at <\/span>www.findthegoldentoad.comwww.findthegoldentoad.com<\/span><\/a>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Northern<\/a>Mariana Laas | NAU Communications
\n(928) 523-5050 | mariana.laas@nau.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A childhood obsession kindled by his father’s stories took\u202fTrevor Ritland, assistant director of communications for student affairs, and his twin brother on an epic journey through the cloud forests of Costa Rica in search of an elusive toad that was discovered in 1964 and vanished more than 30 years ago. Their discoveries and experiences are…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":74942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1817],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humans-of-nau"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}