He’s Mapping Every Species on Earth to Save It
What if the key to understanding extinction, resilience, and the future of life on Earth is… frogs?
In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Alessandro Catenazzi, Half-Earth Chair of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation and associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University. Alessandro has spent decades in the Andes and Amazon documenting amphibians, discovering new species, and watching frog populations crash and, in some cases, slowly come back.
We get into the Half-Earth Project and what it really means to set aside half the planet for nature, why the Amazon and tropical mountains are such intense hotspots of biodiversity, and how islands became ground zero for extinctions. We talk about gladiator tree frogs that literally fight with spines on their thumbs, the devastating fungal disease that wiped out amphibians worldwide, and the wild ways frogs use their skin, microbiome, and peptides to survive.
Alessandro also shares deeply human stories from the field: being stranded on a bone-dry guano island with no water, listening for a “lost” frog species he hadn’t heard in 25 years, and how working with students and local communities has shaped his sense of meaning and legacy.
If you care about biodiversity, climate change, conservation biology, or just love hearing how strange and beautiful the natural world really is, this episode will stay with you.
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