On a Sunday evening in late April, Ellen Pehek pushed apart a thicket of tall reeds at the edge of a murky Staten Island pond, searching for one of New York City’s rarest animals.
The pond, in a marshy area along an access road near a cluster of Amazon and IKEA warehouses, didn’t look like anything special. But Dr. Pehek, a retired city parks department ecologist, felt confident that the Atlantic Coast leopard frog was nearby.
“That’s where I’ve seen them before,” she said. “We found roadkill on the road right near there, and I know we caught tadpoles in the pond in the past.”
Few people would associate this desolate section of the borough’s West Shore with rare amphibians. But Staten Island is one of just three counties in New York where the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, a species identified less than 15 years ago, is known to live. This spring, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation added the frog to its endangered species list — the first addition of a New York City resident since 1999. The designation, coming as the federal Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to weaken habitat protections nationwide, galvanized efforts to protect the frog’s habitat from further encroachment.
As the sun retreated behind the Goethals Bridge, Dr. Pehek crouched in her thigh-high rubberized muck boots and orange insulated jacket, listening.
Soon, the frogs were ready to mingle. A colony of spring peepers began their rhythmic chorus, occasionally interrupted by the faint mechanical beep of a truck backing up in a nearby parking lot.
Suddenly, a pair of mysterious baritone soloists joined the symphony of peepers with a burst of staccato notes followed by a languorous snore. Dr. Pehek estimated that three Atlantic Coast leopard frogs were near the water, but it was too dark to see them.
“Before the warehouses were here, there were thousands and thousands of them,” she said. “Now, I don’t know.”
The Staten Island frogs are about two to three inches long, olive green with coffee-colored spots. Local environmentalists had long thought they were another type of leopard frog, until Rutgers University biologists in 2012 made the surprising determination that they belonged to a new species. They have a limited range along the East Coast of the United States and often live in isolated groups. State officials said the current population in New York is unknown.
At night, the males gather at the water’s edge, croaking to attract mates. (Scientists call this competitive courtship strategy “lekking.”) During the day, the frogs sun themselves or forage in tall upland grasses. “They eat anything and everything they can fit into their mouths,” said Jeremy Feinberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who was among the Rutgers biologists who discovered the species.
And, like many New Yorkers, the frogs are facing a housing shortage.
Less than 1 percent of the quarter-million acres of freshwater wetlands that once blanketed New York City still exist. City officials have conserved some marshes, but others are on private property, including the 675-acre site where Atlantic Coast leopard frogs often breed. That land had a vast network of creeks before 1929, when the Gulf Oil Corporation started building aboveground petroleum storage tanks to receive oil from ships in the Arthur Kill strait between Staten Island and New Jersey.
The property was resold for various uses over the decades, including a proposed 82,000-seat NASCAR arena that was quickly scrapped after local resistance. By the time Dr. Feinberg began visiting the site to gather roadkill samples that would allow him to map the frog’s genetics, the oil tanks had been replaced mostly by trash and abandoned vehicles.
Soon after he and his colleagues identified the new species, he learned that the site was being sold to a developer that planned to drain and pave over some of the marshes to build a logistics park. Environmental activists urged the state to list the Atlantic Coast leopard frog as an endangered species and conserve a large swath of wetlands to protect the island’s biodiversity.
But little of the area could be protected under state and federal laws, which applied only to wetlands above a certain size or connected to navigable waters. (A new state law expanding protections for wetlands greater than 7.4 acres is set to go into effect in 2028; some business groups are challenging the updated regulations in court.)
State conservation officials reached a compromise in 2013 with the site’s new owner, Staten Island Marine Development, that shrank the frog’s local habitat significantly. The agreement would preserve about 250 acres of marsh while allowing development to proceed on about 330 acres. By 2020, Matrix Development Group, a New Jersey-based developer, had purchased 200 acres, invested $700 million in the site and leased three warehouses to Amazon and one to IKEA, totaling more than three million square feet of space.
As the area was built up, the frogs survived. But the new endangered-species listing has mobilized environmentalists to push for more protections.
José Ramírez-Garofalo, president of the Staten Island environmental group Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, believes the site should never have been developed and wants a moratorium on construction to protect wildlife in the area.
“People don’t really know anything about the West Shore of Staten Island,” he said. “It’s written off, but it’s a really vital part of our region’s critical habitat for these species.”
In August, the Department of Environmental Conservation released its latest “wildlife action plan,” which it issues every 10 years to provide guidance for protecting species whose populations are in decline and unlock federal funding for those efforts.
The plan included the Atlantic Coast leopard frog among 229 “high-priority species of greatest conservation need.” Among the biggest dangers, it said, were loss and fragmentation of habitat because of development, as well as rising sea levels and the spread of chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen. The state is gathering information from the public about threats to native species and efforts to monitor their populations until Sept. 20.
It remains unclear what role West Shore property owners and their tenants will play in efforts to protect the frog. Matrix executives did not return several calls asking about the frog’s designation. IKEA said in a statement that it was “committed to protecting biodiversity and strives to be an environmental steward across our facilities.” An Amazon spokeswoman said the company would “ensure our operations comply with the state’s regulations to help keep them protected.”
Dr. Feinberg remains hopeful that state and city officials will find ways to conserve the species, whether that means restoring habitats on parcels of city-owned land or even digging passageways under roads so that frogs can move between marshes without being run over.
“We have a terrestrial, low-mobility species that is now endangered, which creates a new question that New York City has never had to deal with,” he said. “Is the city going to embrace them?”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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