CUNDINAMARCA, COLOMBIAIvan Lozano recalls the night the phone rang. It was the Colombian police one Sunday in 1998, and they had some strange news. Two suspicious boxes had been discovered at El Dorado International Airport, in Bogotá, on their way to Europe. Inside, the police found nearly 800 poison dart frogs, crammed into tiny containers.

Lozano, who was then the director of Bogotá’s wildlife rescue center, rushed to the office. But by the time he arrived, many of the frogs had died.

“When I saw that shipment of frogs, I was left speechless,” Lozano says. These weren’t just any frogs. The majority were Lehmann’s poison frogs—a critically endangered species with bright red, yellow, orange, and black bands and found only in a small