- In the late 1980s, Jay M. Savage was among the first to recognize that amphibian declines in protected cloud forests were not isolated anomalies but part of a broader, global pattern that defied familiar explanations.
- His long career combined meticulous field science with institutional foresight, including foundational work in Central American herpetology and a central role in building the Organization for Tropical Studies as a durable base for tropical research and training.
- Savage treated institution-building and mentorship as integral to science itself, quietly supporting generations of students while insisting on continuity, rigor, and collaboration over spectacle or quick results.
- He approached extinction not as tragedy alone but as evidence with consequences, attentive to what disappears as much as what remains, and to the slow signals detected by those who return often enough to notice absence.
In the late 1980s, something began to go wrong in places that were supposed to be safe. Protected cloud forests, buffered from chainsaws and bulldozers, started losing animals that had persisted through far rougher times. Amphibians—often abundant, often overlooked—were vanishing in patterns that did not fit the usual explanations. Field biologists, trained to distrust drama, found themselves comparing notes with an unfamiliar unease.
“A bunch of us got together and started comparing notes,” recalled Jay Mathers Savage, then a professor of biology at the University of Miami, in a 1992 interview with the New York Times. “People were struck by the fact it seemed to be occurring on a worldwide basis.” He had the credibility to make that observation land. For decades he had worked at the seam where taxonomy meets ecology, building arguments from specimens, notebooks, and repeated returns to the same humid places. His specialty was amphibians and reptiles, especially those of Central America—a region he came to know through sustained work rather than brief expeditions.
One of those projects produced an animal that later became a symbol. In 1964, in what is now the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, Savage and a colleague documented a toad that seemed almost designed to defy understatement. Its scientific name was Bufo periglenes. In life it was better known as the golden toad, the male an improbable Day-Glo orange. It spent most of its time underground and then surfaced for an annual, explosive breeding season—a brief, concentrated ritual that made it easy to count and, later, hard to forget. Scientists watched thousands gather. Then, in 1988, only one adult male was found at the main breeding site. Two years later there were none, and none have been seen since.
The disappearance did not stop with a single charismatic species. Other cloud-forest amphibians followed the same arc: present, common, then abruptly scarce. Glass frogs—small, lime-green animals with translucent undersides—had been abundant until the late 1980s. “Jewels in the night we called them,” Savage recalled. “You used to see hundreds.” Harlequin frogs, patterned in black, yellow, and red, also declined sharply. The cumulative effect was to make local explanations feel inadequate. “Human beings are great at rationalization,” Savage said. “We said, it must be local damage; if we just went over the hill, we’d find them. Most herpetologists were trying to explain things that way. What was striking was that we found it was happening on such a broad basis.”
Savage’s ability to connect the particular with the general had been shaped long before amphibian declines entered public consciousness. He came up through a mid-century scientific culture that prized collections and close description, then carried that sensibility into field biology. Over a long career he produced a large body of work—more than 200 publications—and trained scores of graduate students, building what amounted to an academic lineage in herpetology. His appointments included a long tenure at the University of Southern California and, later, the University of Miami, where he helped shape a tropical-biology program that matched institutional ambition to regional reality.
He was also drawn, repeatedly, to the unglamorous labor of institution-building. In the early 1960s, tropical biology was rich in promise but poor in scaffolding. Universities flirted with field stations that struggled to survive beyond a few seasons. Funding was episodic. Training in the tropics was often treated as a detour rather than a discipline. Savage believed this was backward. From his experience in Costa Rica, he concluded that tropical biology would not mature without a permanent base—one that combined teaching, research, and collaboration across institutions and borders.
From that observation followed a more ambitious idea. With colleagues in the United States and Costa Rica, Savage helped design a program that would bring scientists to the tropics not as visitors but as participants. The early courses that preceded the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) were aimed first at faculty, on the theory that convincing professors would eventually send students south. The strategy worked. By the mid-1960s, graduate training had become central, and Costa Rica had emerged as a hub for tropical field education rather than a peripheral destination. Savage was involved at every stage: drafting proposals, negotiating with universities, and persuading the National Science Foundation that tropical biology deserved sustained support.
The organization that emerged from this effort was deliberately modest in tone and expansive in intent. It was a consortium rather than a flagship, designed to outlast individual careers and institutional fashions. Savage resisted grand rhetoric about discovery. What mattered to him was continuity: courses that ran every year, field sites that remained accessible, and a governance structure sturdy enough to absorb mistakes. When later generations came to see OTS as an inevitability, he was among those who remembered how contingent it had been.
Institution-building, however, did not replace mentoring. Savage’s influence was often most visible in small, unrecorded acts of attention. He sought out younger scientists, listened carefully, and intervened when needed, without making a performance of it. Support was given quietly but concretely—time, advice, advocacy when it counted. Many who passed through his orbit carried forward not only his intellectual habits but his expectations of how a scientific community should behave.
Those who worked with him recall an encyclopedic knowledge of his field, but also a willingness to range well beyond it. Conversations moved easily from taxonomy to philosophy, from university politics to art, without collapsing into display. He valued curiosity that was durable rather than fashionable. He wanted students who could tolerate ambiguity, endure long field seasons, and return to the same questions year after year. In that sense, OTS reflected his temperament. It favored immersion over spectacle, collaboration over branding, and patience over quick results.
Savage remained involved with OTS for decades, through periods of expansion and moments of genuine peril. There were times when finances tightened, leadership faltered, or external expectations threatened to distort the organization’s purpose. He helped navigate those moments without romanticizing them. Institutions, he believed, survived not through optimism alone but through attention to detail and a willingness to make uncomfortable decisions when required. Growth, in his view, was useful only if it preserved function.
By the time OTS approached its fiftieth anniversary, it had trained generations of ecologists and helped define how tropical biology is taught and practiced. That outcome was never guaranteed. It depended on people willing to do administrative labor alongside scientific work, and to treat mentorship as seriously as publication. Savage was one of those people. The structures he helped put in place continue to operate, largely indifferent to biography—which may be the most exact measure of their success.
The same instincts—patient accumulation of evidence, suspicion of easy narratives, attention to what endures—also shaped how he interpreted biological loss. He did not treat extinction as spectacle. He treated it as data with consequences.
In science, as in ecosystems, the most consequential changes are sometimes registered first by those who return to the same place often enough to notice what is missing.
Header image: Jay M Savage. Screenshot from an interview with OTS.
