LULU: 3, 2, 1. Imagine.

NOELANI: Your teeth fall out. 

SFX: teeth falling out

LULU: And as for your ears?

ANA Longo: Oh, you would lose your ears for sure.

[boing boing]

LULU: And you begin to breathe.

INHALE

LISSA: Through your skin

EXHALE

LULU: Your fingers start growing velcro.

LISSA: They're sticky

NOELANI: So you can climb up wet trees and the underside of leaves

LULU: You peer through the dark with bulging golden eyes

LISSA: and you're looking for a girlfriend.

NOELANI: So you open your mouth and scream.

ANA Longo: And you'd say, “coQUI!”

LULU: You have become 

ANA Longo: A coquí frog 

LULU: Okay. Now is the time when I ask you to sing the theme song with me.

ANA Longo: laughing

THEME SONG: Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst we are the

ANA Longo: Bestrials?

THEME: bestrials

LULU: You got it!

ANA Longo: laughing

LULU: Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth. I'm your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my song bud.

ALAN: coquí!

LULU: Alan.

ALAN: This episode sounds ribbiting!

ANA Coquis don't ribbit, dude.

ALAN: Wait, but they're frogs. Frogs go ribbit.

ANA: Not all frogs, Alan.

LULU: And that is ProducerBud Ana.

ANA: Hi!

LULU: who is here to tell us a story about a tiny frog who has the potential to throw the entire planet out of balance.

ANA: Yep! So, this all started when I went to Hawaii. I got off the plane, and I saw a sign and it said, "Frogs keeping you up at night? Report coqui frogs to the government! Trap them! Burn them! Kill them on sight!”

LULU: Wait it actually said kill them on sight? 

ANA: Ok, not exactly but that is how it felt reading the sign.... Because I love coqui frogs, look what I’m wearing right now, I wore this for you!

[necklace rustling]

LULU: Gasp! Oh it’s a necklace with tiny little silver coqu´I on it!

ANA: I wear it close to my chest because coquís are synonymous with being Puerto Rican (which is where my dad’s side of the family is from). They are everywhere on the island. 

LULU: Do you see them?

ANA: You rarely see them. They’re super tiny, kinda golden brown... But you can HEAR them.

COQUI SFX

ANA:  They have this particular call that they do all night long. The forests are usually filled with thousands of these frogs, so it creates this three dimensional sound scape. 

LULU: Are they kinda like sonic fireflies?

ANA: Exactly

[flickering sound moment]

LULU: That sounds really nice...  But then you’re in Hawai’i and they’re saying “If you see this Puerto Rican frog, kill it?”

ANA: YES! And I was like what? My frog? The frog? Our frog??

SFX Coquí coquí

ANA: If you're a Boricua out there listening, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but in Hawai’i  they want our frogs dead, and I needed to figure out why. 

LULU: Indeed! Alright I’m in! Lead the way, Ana! 

ANA: So to crack this case, I, Ana, figured I'd check in with another person with an excellent name.

ANA LONGO: My name is Ana Longo. 

ANA: This Ana is an evolutionary biologist from Puerto Rico who happens to speak coquí.

ANA LONGO: So, “coquí”, what means is like the “co”, it's a sound for like deterring other males in the territory. So if you hear, like a coquí frog, that's just like, “co, co, co,” there might be an intruder around.

ANA: The second part of it, “quí”, means kinda the opposite 

ANA Longo: “Quí” is to attract the females. To say like, “hey, come here to this place.”

ANA: I never realized they were saying something

ALAN: Scram - Cmhere! Scram -Cmhere! Scram- I think I love you!

ANA: And that call can get as loud as 100 decibels, per frog which is like a blaring trumpet or a speeding subway car 

TRAIN SFX

ANA: all coming out of something the size of a quarter!

ALAN: tiny but mighty!

ANA: And Ana explained that this tiny cream-colored frog's big powers don't stop with its sound.

ANA LONGO: Yeah

ANA: Like, for example, their biological classification is

ANA LONGO: Eleutherodactylus. 

ANA: It means free toes. No webbed feet! These little dudes have froggy fingers that act like the treads of a tire, which make them incredibly good at climbing, hiding, and hunting. So when Ana Longo treks out into the rainforests of Puerto Rico to study them–

ANA LONGO  They jump so fast that we have to secure them while we do our measurements

ANA: Like little ninjas, they can scurry up trees, flip off the undersides of leaves, and ambush prey [hiya!] like spiders,

ALAn: yum!  

ANA: And ants 

ALAN: tasty tasty

ANA: And their super fast reflexes help them bound away from their predators like 

LONGO: Snakes

ALAN: ah!

LONGO: and spiders

ALAN AND ANA SINGING: LET'S TAKE A BREAK TO CONSIDER THAT A SPIDER CAN EAT A FROG. Which is weird because frogs also eat spiders. CHOMP! 

ANA: And finally, Ana told me something about coquís that I didn't even believe.

LONGO: The coquí bypasses metamorphosis. So there's no tadpole stage. 

ALAN: Egg-squeezeme?

ANA: THAT'S RIGHT! They're never tadpoles. I totally thought all frogs had to be tadpoles, but nope! Not coquís. they come out of the egg as teeny tiny frogs, smaller than a pea! 

ALAN: Teeheehee! 

ANA: And they have a way higher chance of survival than other frog species

LONGO: Almost like eighty percent success rate. Yeah, it's pretty cool. 

ANA: So coquís are EVERYWHERE! Which is impressive because living on an island like Puerto Rico can be really difficult sometimes. you get really terrible storms, and you’re kind of forgotten about. Coquís and Puerto Rican people have managed to survive all of that.

There’s even a famous rock by a waterfall with ancient spirals and drawings carved by the Taino people, the first people to live in Puerto Rico. One is a little frog creature that people see as a coquí. It’s a symbol we still use today, you can find it on bumper stickers and tattoos. It's a symbol of being Puerto Rican. 

And it’s the sound of everything in balance, frogs eating insects eating frogs, and lulling humans to sleep...

LONGO: Oh, we slept like babies because the calls were perfect for us.

ANA: Ana now lives off the island, in Florida, where, she says, there are no little coquitos.

LONGO: Oh, I miss them. I miss them so bad. It's like nights are so like, you know, so silent.

ANA: Do you ever like play a, like a Spotify, like coquí sound??

LONGO: Yeah, 

ANA: Really?

LONGO: Yeah.

ANA: But on the other side of the world, there are people who hear that same sound 

COQUÍ

ANA: so differently. 

LISSA:  it's metallic sounding 

ANA: like nails on a chalkboard or

LISSA: like a lawnmower or a motorcycle engine,

[LOUD SOUNDS BUILD AND WHOOSH TO SILENCE]

ANA: Um, do you remember your first time killing a coquí?

LISSA: Um, yeah.

ANA: All right, this got dark quick. Let's take a little break. 

ANA: Terrestrials is back. This is Ana, and we're talking about coquís. Hope you packed your flip flops, cause we are going to Hawaii. 

NOELANI: Aloha

ANA: Oh, Hawaii. A beautiful group of islands in the Pacific. 

Alan: [yell] an archipelago! 

ANA: And Hawai’i has flowers and critters you can’t find anywhere else on the planet. 

NOELANI: So we have a carnivorous caterpillar, and he's super cool looking.

ANA: like meat-eating?

NOELANI: Yes! It eats bugs.

ANA: This is marine ecologist and professor of Hawaiian science Noelani Puniwai talking about species, talking about a species only found on her island of Hawaii.. 

NOELANI: And so you see him, like, stand up on his hind legs and attack things.

ANA: Noelani explained that living things, like this carnivorous caterpillar, came to evolve on her island of Hawai’i without any human involvement, totally by the powers of nature. And that makes them something called a native species.

NOELANI: We have our happy face spider, and it's like this fluorescent color, and it's got this big huge happy face on its back. It's the nananana. 

ANA: Nananana?

NOELANI: Nananana, it's our spider.

ANA: Is that a Hawaiian word? Nananana?

NOELANI: Yeah, so, “nana” means to look, to see. And so if you have eight eyes, you can nananana, right?

ANA: wow

ALAN : Na, na na na na, na na na na, na na na na, na na na, native species! 

ANA: But then, about a thousand years ago, the first non native species showed up.

NOELANI: Humans.

ANA: And they brought with them all kinds of new living beings. Now, some were welcome.

NOELANI: Mango, we have avocado

ANA: But others were not so welcome.

NOELANI: Centipedes and scorpions and fire ants, which have all taken over Hawai’i. 

ANA: These are what are called invasive species

ALAN: evil laugh

ANA: Species introduced by human beings intentionally or not, that tend to take over entire ecosystems and change them. And today, Hawaii is sometimes called / sometimes known as the invasive species capital of the world. 

ALAN: That sounds bad! 

ANA: A perfect environment for a little Puerto Rican homie to show up in the 1980s.

ALAN: Aloha! Surfs up!

ANA: He hitched a ride on a plant shipped from Puerto Rico. and Hawaiian people started hearing a new sound in their forests, [coquí],

FUN DESTRUCTIVE MUSIC IN

ANA: These little coquí cowboys kicked open the doors of Hawai'i, took a good hard look around, and figured out

NOELANI: They don't have a lot of predators,

ANA: Meaning nothing to keep them in check.  

ALAN:  yeehaw! 

NOELANI: There's no stopping them

ANA: What started as a few frogs on one plant has grown and grown to be hundreds of thousands of frogs, millions, possibly even billions!

LISSA: They reach densities two to three times greater than they would in Puerto Rico.

ANA: Lissa Strohecker is another anti coquí personi who lives on the neighboring island of Maui, where coquís have also invaded.  

LISSA: YEAH

ANA: And all of these coquí monsters need to eat  

ALAN: Me love invertebrates

ANA: They're gobbling up spiders, like the nananana 

ALAN: Yummy.

ANA: and caterpillars like the native carnivorous one. 

ALAN: Delicioso!

ANA: Each frog eats at least seven invertebrates a night. 

ALAN: Chomp chomp chomp! Tummy full!

ANA: Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of frogs, and that's enough to wipe out entire populations of Hawaii's most special species.

NOELANI: So once our native species are pushed out, there's nowhere else that they will exist on this planet, 

ANA: Meaning, they’d go extinct. And what's more, when coquis digest those insects, and ya know poop out whats left… 

LISSA: All of that poop has to go somewhere. So it goes down into the soil. cookie frogs increased nitrogen in the soil 

ANA: And that extra nitrogen in the soil, well, it can be toxic to some of the native plants! So what we get is this huge domino effect with this little coquí croaking on the top that sets off a cascading chain reaction of destruction that messes with the balance of the ecosystem. And Noelani? She can hear the breaking of that balance. Hawai’i used to be so quiet at night when she was a kid .

NOELANI: We had only crickets in the forest. 

ANA: But now.

NOELANI:  You just hear this constant coquí, coquí, coquí, coquí!

ANA: It's coquí cacophony. 

NOELANI:  It is so loud, and you can't even pick apart one sound because it's just crazy

ANA: I was now starting to see that those signs in airports, the outrage, all of it, people weren't just trying to get rid of an annoying frog. It was an attempt to save the lives of creatures more vulnerable than them. Creatures as dear to the hearts of Hawaiian people as coquís are to me. 

NOELANI: Hawaii is always going to be in this position where people and animals and plants want to come and see us and visit us, um, and we need to figure out what that balance is, right? How much can we welcome? We can't invite everybody, right? Or else we won't be Hawaii anymore.

ANA: and these little terrestrial terrors are hopping from island to island,  hiding in shipping containers and planes, popping up and pooping all over the Hawaiian archipelago. So, finally, human beings beings decided it was time to fight back. 

LISSA: We tried helicopters.

ANA: Lissa is part of an anti-invasive species team in charge of trying to kill, or control is the nice word that scientists sometimes use, the coquí population. 

LISSA: And you have the big bucket filled with citric acid solution, 

ANA: That's the chemical in sour candies that makes your mouth pucker up. It's harmless to most forest creatures, but not to coquís 

LISSA: Sorry, buddy. 

ANA: So Lissa and her team would take buckets of this stuff up into helicopters.

LISSA: And we go and fly over the forest and dump it out. 

ANA: But still: 

coqui, co coqui! 

ANA: Cause the helicopters could only fly during the day, which is not ideal for spraying for a nocturnal frog. So, they got a truck with big headlights and a

LISSA: Thousand gallon tank

ANA: filled with citric acid, and then by night, they  would drive up to those hard to reach places in the mountains.

LISSA: And then go out and spray the forest with the citric acid solution.

SPRAY SOUND

LISSA: Overnight, the rats come and eat all of the little corpses. 

ANA: UGH, but Lissa could hear… that it was working. The areas where her team sprayed the acid, fell silent.

LISSA: Wow. Like, this is what it's supposed to be.

MUSIC

ANA: After talking to Lissa and Noelani, I could finally understand why getting rid of the coquí made sense in Hawaii, and yet… couldn't help putting myself in the body of a little coquí. Who just arrived in this paradise and then started to get attacked by human beings. They didn’t choose to come to Hawai’i: humans brought them here. And now they’re waging a full on war against them. I understood the problem with my head. But not my heart. Which is why I get a little secretly giddy when I hear that the coquís in Hawai’i are still surviving all the weapons that human beings throw at them. 

ANA LONGO:  Coquí frogs are too smart. 

SONG STARTS:

ALAN +ANA: We’re the smartest froggies in the game

That’s why the whole world knows our name

We’re the smartest froggies in the game

That’s why the whole world knows our name

SEBA OTERO:  Mucho gusto yo soy Kiko

Un coquí más de los que vive en puerto rico

Tú sabes que cuando me pico

No te dejo dormir, cómo te explico

Pues que no le bajo ni un chispito desde chamaquito

Y ese soy yo acá

Mi primo está en Hawái

Y pa poder conectar con una coquí

Est´aprendiendo lenguaje de señas

Porque si canta lo pueden cazar

Y cómo quiera seguimos aquí seguimos aquí

y vamo a seguir

Y la vamo a montar

Estemos en Marte

O estemos en París (Oui oui)

Porque te montamo el pary

Una coquifonía

Te montamo el pary

Una coquifonía

Te montamo el pary

Una coquifonía

Te montamo el pary

Una coquifonía

SONG ENDS

NEW LULU: A coquí symphony! WOW! Alan Goffinski with Puerto Rican musician Seba Otero playing the part of a tiny rapping coquí he named “Kiko. Also with some backgrounds from Ana in there. I heard you.

ANA: Yup. And Lulu, there is a final plot twist in this whole story.

LULU: Really?

ANA: MM HM. Over in Puerto Rico, there's now AN INVASIVE SPECIES threatening the coquis frogs. 

LULU: Oh no!

ANA: Yeah, it's a gnarly little fungus that grows on their skin 

LULU: Ew

ANA LONGO: We've already lost three species in the last three decades, due to this fungal pathogen

LULU: Awww

ANA: Yeah, but Ana Longo is finding that over time, the remaining coqui species have somehow figured out a way, To fight back against the fungus and win!

LULU: Gasp! Meaning they clear it and survive?

LONGO: Yeah, to me it's amazing. If you've been in Puerto Rico, they are in the plants, they put their eggs in your window, they put their eggs like anywhere.

ANA: So, Ana’s hoping that if she can figure out how the coquis are fighting this fungus naturally, maybe that could help human beings that are suffering from funguses and other types of diseases.  

LULU: Whoa so like coquí may hold the key.

ANA: The key

LULU: to fighting fungus?

ANA: Yeah and that might help preserve ecosystems across the world

LONGO: I'm rooting for the coquí frogs. I always root for the coquí frogs. laughing

LULU: Well I am too now! Go coquís... Goqí! Coquí!

ANA: laughs

LULU: And go go Ana. Thank you so much for bringing us this tale and there’s nothing else cool about to happen

BADGERS SOUNDS

LULU : Gasp! What's that? 

BADGERS: Excuse me, I have a question! Me too, me three, me four!

LULU: The badgers!!! Listeners with badgering questions for the experts

LULU: Are you ready?

ANA LONGO: Yes

ELLIOT: Hello, my name is Eliot Langlois. I am seven years old. How high do coquís jump?  

LONGO: Pretty high. Pretty high. More than 20 feet probably.  

ANA G: And this is for like a one and a half inch creature? 

ANA LONGO: Yeah, for this big. They just shoot. 

ANA G: It's like if we jumped like a hundred feet,

ANA LONGO: Yeah, we we're not able to do those kinds of jumps, I don't think

JULIETTE : My name is Juliette. I’m seven years old from Atlanta, Georgia. My question is: do coquís frogs fart? 

ANA LONGO: They have to, right? They're eating  and they have to fart. 

GG: Hi. My name is GG, and I’m 34 years old. Is it okay to kiss a frog to turn it back into a prince or princess? Maybe?

ANA LONGO: Oh, I wish,  I wish, but no. There's, um, some frogs, , that are, uh, poisonous, so we don't, if you don't know this particular species, right? You shouldn't even like touch them at all.  They are ectotherms, so they're going to have the same temperature as their environment. So one of the things that happens, when you grab a coquí frog, if you hold them for long, you're transferring all your heat to that tiny frog and you could potentially harm them too. So I would say, please do not kiss the frog. 

BENICIO: My name is Benicio. I’m 5 years old. How do coquís hear the call? 

ANA LONGO: So they don't seem to have ears like we do, like external ears. Right. They do have a tempo. And that tempo basically is like an eardrum, it's a membrane, that it's exposed, that  filter the sound right. And detect those. Sound pressures basically, and then send them to the brain and that, that's where they can differentiate. Like, is this call coming from my same species, . Or is this call coming from another species so I shouldn't care about?

ANA G: Whoa. So tympanum, like timpani  the drum.

ANA LONGO: Yes. Yes. 

ANA G: Cool.

JOHN: Hi. I’m John, and I am eight years old. Have you ever eaten frog legs before?

ANA LONGO: Frog legs. Yes. I'm sorry. I have to confess.  Not coquí frogs though. American Bullfrogs. Those frogs are also invasive. Those frogs are pretty tasty I would say. It's like, it's a mixture between like chicken and fish

ANA G: And how, how did you eat it? Was it fried

ANA LONGO: Fried. Yeah. Fried. Yeah. It's not that I would eat them every day, but…

LULU: Ok well that is the best place to leave it with the ribbit crunch.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios.

Our Executive Producer is Sarah Sandbach.

This episode was reported and produced by Ana Gonzalez. Our team also includes: Mira Burt -Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plourde. Fact-checking by Anna Peugot Mazzini. 

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you!

Special thanks to Dr. Jorge Vélez-Juarbe, and you, for listening! 

Big shout out to our storytellers Ana Longo, Noelani Puniwai, and Lissa Stroehecker. And to our guest musician! The tiny rapping frog: Seba Otero! You can find his music on Spotify and Apple Music as Seba Otero and on instagram @elsebaotero. 

If you want to see pictures of the animals from our episodes (and videos of us dancing and being silly) follow us on instagram and tiktok @terrestrialspodcast

AND FINALLY If you like our strange little show about the earth and the creatures on it, please rate and review our podcast on Apple or Spotify. And/or pledge a few dollars of your support. You can support terrestrials by becoming a member of the Lab. Just go to terrestrialspodcast.org/join. 

This season, if you sign up, you’ll get a signed photocopy of a rat from our rats episode. I promise it’s cute and kinda stylish and not gross.

That was a lotta links, all of it is also linked in the episode description wherever you are listening right now. Just scroll down, you’ll see it. Thank you so much for listening. See you in a couple spins of this dirty ol’ planet of ours….bye!