Travel Photography > Isthmus > Isla Bastimentos, Panama

And anyways, genetics may soon see this Salt Creek Strawberry Frog as a species unto its own.

The Salt Creek community is receiving support from private groups, as well as funding from U.S. Aid, in order to protect the area and the culture.  Various initiatives have served to set up tilapia farms, train the Ngobe Indians in tourism management, and to find alternatives to fishing in the degrading coral reefs around this area.  The programs appear to be diverting this quiet, nearly empty wilderness from the worst aspects of development. 

The tiny red frog, and its various populations, are just a tiny component of the complex set of stresses placed on these hotspots of biodiversity.  But, considering that amphibians are the front-line of a very new sort of battle, it is worthwhile to consider them as representative for a larger set of issues.

In this context, it is rewarding to see the success of the Salt Creek community, and to see Bastimentos as a huge island known more for a handful of forward-thinkng eco-resorts and native communities at the edge of a vast, roadless interior.  And it is rewarding to see the Red Frog Beach Resort not as a failure, but as a rotting carcass, and a big, sprawling golf course megadevelopment that never was.

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