The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and the vanished species of the golden toad—Twin documentarians and environmental writers, who have collaborated with Leonardo DiCaprio’s RE:WILD campaign, carry on their father’s mission at the heart of the modern extinction crisis. 

As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent Golden Toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide in Monteverde, Costa Rica’s cloud forests, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and vanish again beneath the earth. But as the years passed by, the toads’ numbers diminished, with the last of them vanishing without a trace more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors abound—alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive?

In The Golden Toad, the Ritlands set off to investigate an environmental mystery with miraculous surprises, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists, including the last person to have seen the golden toad, the Ritlands return to the jungle to hunt for clues in the wild cloud forest. As Trevor searches for the victims, Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths intertwine when they discover that a pandemic of serial killer fungi elevated by changing climate could be the culprit. The toad’s demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crisis but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.

Trevor Ritland spent two years in the cloud forests of Costa Rica before returning to the US to complete graduate work in documentary studies and science communication. He is an adjunct instructor in the Creative Media & Film program at Northern Arizona University and is the documentarian of “El Dorado: The Search for the Golden Toad” along with other projects exploring imperiled species and environmental mysteries. Trevor lives with his wife Priscilla and their dog Indie in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Trevor and Kyle founded Adventure Term, Inc., a nonprofit teaching environmental storytelling through field expeditions. Beyond writing for publications like The Atlantic, BBC, and The Guardian, they have collaborated with Leonardo DiCaprio’s RE:WILD on the organization’s “Search for Lost Species” campaign.

Kyle Ritland earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside while working as a freelance environmental journalist, chasing stories of island foxes, desert birds, and big cats. He lives at the edge of the woods in the American Northeast with his wife Alannah and their two cats, Hazel and Fiver.