Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has come to the defense of the Pehuenche frog (Alsodes pehuenche), an amphibian classified as critically endangered, in the face of the threat posed to its survival by the advancement of the Los Cóndores-Río Diamante electrical interconnection project in the Chilean Maule region.
In an Instagram post tagging the Chilean Herpetology Network and accompanied by photographs of the amphibian and its habitat, the Titanic star warned on Sunday that fewer than 1,000 specimens of the species remain and noted that Chile could approve “a catastrophic plan that destroys the heart of its only known habitat.” However, the actor clarified that his call is not to halt the project: “The request is not to stop the transmission project,” but rather to build it in a location that does not expose the species to greater risk.
The project DiCaprio refers to, promoted by Enel Generación Chile, involves the construction of an approximately 500-kilovolt electrical transmission line intended to interconnect the energy systems of Chile and Argentina. Within Chilean territory alone, an overhead line of 26.6 kilometers and the installation of 72 high-voltage towers are planned, infrastructure that would directly cross the habitat of the Pehuenche frog. A decisive step for the initiative was scheduled for Monday: the Environmental Evaluation Commission (COEVA) was to issue a statement on a favorable report from the Environmental Evaluation Service (SEA) for its approval. However, the session was suspended following DiCaprio’s message, with no public information on the reason for the postponement or the new date, Claudio Azat, director of the One-Health Institute and co-chair of the specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told EL PAÍS.
The government of José Antonio Kast reacted to the actor’s intervention. The Minister of the Environment, Francisca Toledo, stated in an interview with Radio ADN that DiCaprio’s post referred to a project still undergoing environmental evaluation, so she preferred not to comment on it while it remains in process. Instead, the Secretary of State chose to defend the functioning of the country’s environmental institutions: “Chile has a robust environmental institutional framework, in which all data are evaluated and weighed for environmental assessments.”
Read more Live video | Rescue efforts after the earthquake in Colombia
The Pehuenche frog exists nowhere else in the world except in the high Andes of Chile and Argentina. The person who pushed for the defense of this species to reach Re:wild, the conservation organization founded by DiCaprio, was Chilean Claudio Azat. “It is a little-known species. It was described by science about three or four decades ago. We know it has a very restricted distribution and that its main threat is the international route connecting the Chilean city of Talca with Malargüe, Argentina,” Azat explained.
This amphibian is distinguished because, during the breeding season, males develop patches of gelatinous spines on their chest and fingers. They are also known as Popeye frogs — like the famous cartoon character — because their arms thicken to hold the female during mating. The species was classified as critically endangered in 2018, a category it has not left. “It is a species that only lives in Alto Maule, in the Pehuenche valley, in small streams and meadows formed by the melting of snow and glaciers in the high mountains of the central Andes, at more than 2,000 meters altitude. Its population reaches one thousand individuals,” Azat details.
The activist acknowledges that although they had been denouncing the frog’s situation for some time, the visibility given by DiCaprio has been a decisive boost. “This is the second time he has supported a species in Chile. In 2019, he posted about the campaign to save the Loa frog, which was very positive because it changed the situation of that species,” Azat concludes.