MILWAUKEE— A Marquette University physics professor is helping to preserve an endangered glass frog species found in Central America.

Rick Boyd recently became the second person in North America to breed the granulosa glass frog.

Boyd said he had to overcome several challenges to accomplish this goal. The first was finding a female glass frog.

He said they were difficult to find because males are usually the only ones captured because of their mating calls.

However, Boyd said he lucked out and purchased a female from an exporter.

He named it “Millie,” short for “Mildred,” which means gentle strength.

“I’ve had her in her test tube for some of the rotations on the rain chamber and I can see dark eggs developing again, so I am hopeful that she will lay eggs again,” said Boyd.

To get the glass frogs to breed, Boyd said he recreated their habitat and the rain patterns of a rainforest.

Boyd said he wanted to breed this species of frog because, due to deforestation, they are an endangered species in Central America.

“We are kind of in a race against time and part of what I do is to create kind of a Noah’s Ark of of frogs,” said Boyd.

Andrew Kunz , the Marquette University physics department chair, said he feels that Boyd helping preserve the granulosa glass frog is not only a tremendous accomplishment, but also beneficial for students.

“To be able to show students how those different conditions manifest themselves in different ways of breeding and growing things is cool and so it’s one thing to read about it in a book. It’s absolutely another thing to experience it and see it and have it brought into the classroom and I think that makes for a lasting impact,” said Kunz.

Boyd is also the founder of Rainforest Rick LLC. It’s a hobby business where he sells the frogs he breeds to local pet stores.

He called it conservation through commercialization

“Every frog that I can raise in captivity that goes into the hobby business— the pet trade— as a pet dart frog, tree frog, glass frog, every one of those that I do that with… is one less frog that the pet store owner is going to want to buy from the Amazon,” said Boyd.

Boyd said he believes this method is a win-win for everyone; this way, he explained, glass frogs won’t be taken from their natural habitats, nor will pet owners have to worry about diseases or parasites that the wild ones could have.