Inside the audacious mission to bring a rare toad back from the brink

Love — or at least sex — was in the air of the small, windowless, biosecure room at the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas. Sixteen rectangular, clear plastic bins lined the room’s back and side walls, tiny stages for unlikely romances.

Each bin contained a plastic green pond plant — the kind you would buy for fish to make Nemo feel at home — about an inch of water, and two endangered Houston toads, a drab-looking critter with a pale belly, dark spots, and raised patches of skin that, in a betrayal of the stereotypes, aren’t warts.

It was a Wednesday afternoon over the spring, and Allison Julien, the zoo’s reproductive science biologist, prepped 16 syringes to inject hormones into the croaking male toads to help, well, get them in the mood. The females, hanging out in their respective bins, had alr