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From WNYC. Three, two, one. Imagine your teeth fall out. And as for your ears? Oh, you would lose your ears for sure. And you begin to breathe through your skin.
Your fingers start growing velcro. They're sticky. So you can climb up wet trees and the underside of leaves. Now you peer through the dark through your golden, bulging eyes. And you're looking for a girlfriend. So you open your mouth and scream. You say, cookie. You have become a cookie frog.
Alright, now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me. Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the
Best deals? Best Reels. You got it. Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. I am your host, Lulu Miller, joined as always by my song bud. Cookie. Alan. This episode sounds ribbiting. Ribbit. Cookies don't ribbit, dude. But they're frogs. Frogs go ribbit. Not all frogs, Alan. And that there is producer bud, Ana. Hey.
Hello! And you are here to tell us a story about a tiny frog who has the potential to throw the entire planet out of balance? Yep. So this all started when I traveled to Hawaii. I got off the plane and I saw this big sign with a lot of exclamation points and a picture of a frog. And it said, frog.
Frogs keeping you up at night? Report cookie frogs to the government. Trap them. Burn them. Kill them on sight. Wait, it actually said kill them on sight? Okay, not exactly, but that is how it felt reading this sign because I love cookie frogs. Look, look what I'm wearing right now. I wore this for you.
Oh, it's a necklace with a tiny little silver coquille frog on it. I wear it close to my chest because coquilles are synonymous with being Puerto Rican, which is where my dad's side of the family is from. They are everywhere on the island. Do you see them? You rarely see them. They're super tiny, kind of golden brown, but you can hear them. 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 like three-dimensional soundscape. Are they kind of like sonic fireflies? Exactly.
That does sound really nice. But then you're in Hawaii. Yeah. And they're saying, if you see this Puerto Rican frog, kill it? Yes. And I was like, what? My frog? The frog? Our frog? Like, if you're a Boricua out there listening, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but in Hawaii, they want our frogs dead. And I needed to figure out why. All right, I'm in. Lead the way, Ana. So to crack this case...
I, Ana, figured I'd check in with another person with an excellent name. My name is Ana Longo. This Ana is an evolutionary biologist from Puerto Rico who happens to speak Coquí. So Coquí, what means is like the co. It's a sound for like deterring other males in the territory. So if you hear a Coquí from there, it's just like co.
There might be an intruder around. The second part of it, key, means kind of the opposite. Key is to attract the females to say like, hey, come here to this place. I never realized they were saying something. Scram. Come here. Scram. Come here. Scram. I think I love you. And that call can get as loud as 100 decibels per frog.
which is like a blaring trumpet or a speeding subway car. All of that coming out of something the size of a quarter. Tiny but mighty. And Ana explained that this tiny frog's big powers don't stop with its sound. Yeah. Like, for example, their biological classification is... 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 rainforest of Puerto Rico to study them, they jump so fast we have to secure them while we do our measurements. Like little ninjas, they can scurry up
trees, flip off the undersides of leaves, and ambush prey like spiders and ants. And their super fast reflexes help them bound away from their predators like snakes to spiders. Let's take a break to consider that a spider can eat a frog, which is kind of weird because frogs also eat spiders. Chomp.
And finally, Ana told me something about cookies that I didn't even believe. The cookie bypasses metamorphosis, so there's no tadpole stage. Egg-scuse? That's right, they are never tadpoles. I totally thought all frogs had to be tadpoles, but nope, not cookies. They come right out of the egg as teeny
teeny tiny frogs smaller than a pea. And they have way higher chances of survival compared to other frog species. Almost like 80% success rate. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So coquilles 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 in Puerto Rico by a waterfall with these ancient spirals and drawings carved by the first people to live in Puerto Rico, the Taino people. And one carving is a tiny little frog-like creature that people see as a coquí. It's a symbol that Puerto Rican people still use today. You can find it on bumper stickers and tattoos because it's a symbol of being Puerto Rican.
And it's the sound of everything in balance. Frogs eating insects, eating frogs, and lulling human beings to sleep. Oh, we slept like babies. The calls were perfect for us.
Ana now lives off the island in Florida, where she says there are no little coquitos. Oh, I miss them. I miss them so bad. It's like nights are so silent. Do you ever play a Spotify coquit sound? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah. But on the other side of the world, there are people who hear that same sound.
so differently. It's metallic sounding, like nails on a chalkboard, like a lawnmower or a motorcycle engine. Do you remember your first time killing a cookie? Um, yeah. All right, this got dark quick. Let's take a quick break.
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This is Terrestrials. I am Anna, and we are talking about cookies. Hope you packed your flip-flops, because we are going to Hawaii. Aloha. Oh, Hawaii. A beautiful group of islands in the Pacific. An archipelago!
And Hawaii has flowers and critters you can't find anywhere else on the planet. So we have a carnivorous caterpillar, and he's super cool looking. Like meat-eating? Yes, it eats bugs. This is marine ecologist and professor of Hawaiian science Noelani Punivai talking about a species only found on her island of Hawaii. So you see him like stand up on his hind legs and attack things.
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. 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 na-na-na-na. Na-na-na-na? Na-na-na-na. It's our spider. Is that a Hawaiian word? Na-na-na-na? Yeah, so na-na means to look, to see. And so if you have eight eyes, you can na-na-na-na, right? Na-na-na, native species!
But then, about a thousand years ago, the first non-native species showed up. Humans. And they brought with them all kinds of new living beings. Now, some were welcome. Mango, we have avocado. But others...
We're not so welcome. Centipedes and scorpions and fire ants, which have all taken over Hawaii. These are what are called invasive species. Species introduced by human beings, intentionally or not, that tend to take over entire ecosystems and change them. And today, Hawaii is sometimes known as the invasive species capital of the world. That sounds bad!
A perfect environment for a little Puerto Rico homie to show up in the 1980s. Aloha! Surf's up! He hitched a ride on a plant ship from Puerto Rico. And soon, Hawaiian people started hearing a new sound in their forests. The
These little koki cowboys kicked open the doors of Hawaii, took a good hard look around, and figured out they don't have a lot of predators. Yee-haw! Meaning nothing to keep them in check. There's no stopping them. What started out as a few frogs on one plant has grown and grown to be hundreds of thousands of frogs, millions possibly.
They reach densities two to three times greater than they would in Puerto Rico. Lissa Strohecker is another anti-kokii personie who lives on the neighboring island of Maui, where kokis have also invaded. Yeah. And all of these kokii monsters need to eat.
They're gobbling up spiders like the na-na-na-na and caterpillars like the native carnivorous one. Each frog eats at least seven invertebrates a night. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of frogs. And that's enough to wipe out entire populations of Hawaii's most special species. So once our native species are pushed out, there's nowhere else that they will exist on this planet.
meaning they'd go extinct. And what's more, when coquilles digest those insects and, you know, poop out what's left, all of that poop has to go somewhere so it goes down into the soil.
- Cokie frogs increase nitrogen in the soil. - And then that extra nitrogen in the soil, well, it can be toxic to some of the native plants. So what we get is like this huge domino effect with this little cokey croaking at the top that comes in and sets off this cascading chain reaction of destruction and messes with the balance of the ecosystem.
And Noelani, she can hear the breaking of that balance. Hawaii used to be so quiet at night when she was a kid. We had only crickets in the forest. But now, you just hear this concert. It's Koki Kakafoni. It's just so loud. And you can't even pick apart one sound because it's just crazy loud.
I was now starting to see that those signs in the airports, the outrage, all of it, people weren't just trying to get rid of a frog that they found annoying. It was an attempt to save the lives of creatures more vulnerable than them. Creatures as dear to the hearts of Hawaiian people as kokis are to me.
Hawaii is always going to be in this position where people and animals and plants want to come and see us and visit us. 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.
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. Me love invertebrates. Oh boy, oh boy. So finally, human beings decided to fight back. We tried helicopters.
Lyssa 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 coquille population. And you have the big bucket filled with citric acid solution. That's the chemical in sour candies that makes your mouth pucker up. It's harmless to most forest creatures, but not to coquilles. Sorry, buddy.
So Lyssa and her team would take huge buckets of this stuff up into helicopters. And we'd go and fly over the forest and...
Jump it out. But still, cookie, go cookie. Because the helicopters could only fly during the day, which is not ideal for spraying on a nocturnal frog. So they got a truck with big headlights and a thousand gallon tank filled with citric acid. And then by night, they would drive up to those hard to reach places in the mountains and then go out and spray the forest with the citric acid solution.
Overnight, the rats come and eat all of the little corpses. But Lissa could hear that it was working. The areas where her team sprayed the acid fell silent. Wow. Like, this is what it's supposed to be. After talking to Lissa and Noelani, I could finally understand why getting rid of the koki makes sense in Hawaii. And yet...
help putting myself in the body of a little Koki who just arrived in this paradise and then started to get attacked by human beings. They didn't choose to come to Hawaii. Human beings brought them there and now they're waging a full-on war against them. I understood the problem with my head and
but not with my heart, which deep down loves cookies. And it's why I get a little secretly giddy when I hear that the cookies in Hawaii are still surviving all the weapons that human beings throw at them. Cookie frogs are too smart. We're the smartest froggies in the game. It's why the whole world knows our name. We're the smartest froggies in the game. It's why the whole world knows our name.
Mucho gusto, yo soy Kiko, un coqui 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 de este chamaquito. Y ese soy yo acá, mi primo está en Hawaii. Y para poder conectar con una coqui, está aprendiendo lengua de señas. Porque si canta, lo puede entazar. Y como quiera seguimos aquí, seguimos aquí, vamos a seguir.
Cookie Symphony. Wow. Alan Gofinski with Puerto Rican musician Seba Otero.
playing the part of a tiny rapping coquí he named Kiko. Also with some backgrounds by Ana in there. I heard you. Yep. And Lulu, there is one final plot twist of this whole story. Really? Yeah. So back in Puerto Rico, there is now an invasive species threatening the coquí frogs.
What? Yeah, it's a gnarly little fungus that grows on their skin. We've already lost three species in the last three decades due to this fungal pathogen. Oh.
Poor coqui. Yeah. But Ana Longo is finding that over time, the remaining coqui species have somehow figured out a way to fight back against this fungus and win. Meaning like they clear it and survive? 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. So Ana's hoping that if she can figure out how...
how the coquilles are fighting this fungus naturally, maybe that could help human beings who are suffering from funguses and other types of diseases. Whoa. So like coquille may hold the key to fighting fungus? Yeah, and that can help preserve ecosystems across the world. I'm rooting for the coquille frogs. I always root for the coquille.
Well, I am too now. Goki. Gokoki. Goki. Goki. And Goko Anna, thank you so much for bringing us this tale. And there is nothing else cool about to happen. What's that? Excuse me. I have a question. Me too. Me three. Me four. The Badgers. Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready? Yes. Yes.
Hello, my name is Elliot Lenglois. I am seven years old. How high do cookies jump? Pretty high. Pretty high. More than 20 feet, probably. And this is for like a one and a half inch creature? For this big. Yeah, they just shoot. It's like if we jumped like a hundred feet. That's crazy. We're not able to do those kinds of jumps. I don't think so. My name is Juliet Lenglois.
I'm seven years old from Atlanta, Georgia. My question is, do Kogi frogs fart? They have to, right? They're eating and they have to fart. Hi, my name is Gigi and I'm 34 years old. Is it okay to kiss a frog to turn it back into a prince or a princess? Maybe? Oh, I wish.
I wish. But no, there's some frogs that are poisonous. So if you don't know this particular species, you shouldn't even touch them at all. They are ectoderms, so they're going to have the same temperature as their environment.
So one of the things that happens to when you grab a cookie 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. My name is Vanessa. I'm five years old. How do cookies hear the call? So
So they don't seem to have ears like we do, like external ears, right? They do have a tympanum. And that tympanum basically is like an eardrum. It's a membrane that it filters the sound and detects those sound pressures, basically, and then sends them to the brain. And that's where they can differentiate, like, is this call coming from my same species or is this call coming from another species? So tympanum, like, timpani the drum? Yes.
Cool. Hi, I'm John and I am eight years old.
Have you ever eaten frog legs before? Frog legs. Yes. I'm sorry. I have to confess. Not cookie frogs, though. American bullfrogs. And those frogs are also invasive, but they're pretty tasty, I would say. It's like, it's a mixture between like chicken and fish. How did you eat it? Was it fried? Fried. Yeah, fried. It's not that I would eat them every day, but...
All right. Well, I think that is the best place to leave it with the Ribbit Nuggets Crunch. Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. Our executive producer is Sarah Sambach. This episode was reported and produced by Ana Gonzalez. Our team also includes Mira Burt-Wintonic, Alan Gofinski, Tanya Chawla, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plord. Fact-checking by Ana Pijot-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 Jorge Velez Huarbe and you for listening. Big shout out to our storytellers, Ana Longo, Noelani Puivay, and Lissa Strohecker. And to our guest musician, the tiny rapping frog, also known as Seba Otero. You can find his music on Spotify and Apple Music as Seba Otero, and on Instagram at 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 at 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 slash join. This season, if you sign up, you'll get a photocopy of a rat from our rats episode. One of the ones that Alan was actually playing with in the studio. I promise it's cute and kind of stylish and not gross. That was a lot of links. All of them are also linked in the episode description wherever you're listening right now. Just scroll down. You'll see it. You can click. Thank you so much for listening. Okay.
See you in a couple of spins of this dirty whole planet Earth. Bye.