Mark Mandica

His professional career began at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the mid-1990s. As a fourth-year undergraduate finishing a degree in Sociology, he talked his way into the upper-level Herpetology course as a pass/fail elective — a class that normally carried a long list of difficult biology prerequisites. That course, and the inspirational teaching of Dr. Al Richmond, changed the trajectory of his life. He added biology as a second degree that same term.

He was not prepared the way the other students were — they had taken the prerequisite classes — but he ran to class to get a seat in front. He did so well in Herpetology that he became the TA for the course the following year. During that transformative semester, his classmates included Orianne Society CEO Chris Jenkins (who also serves on the AF board), Tobias Landberg, turtle biologist and chair of AF’s Science Advisory Board, and Jeff Corwin of the Jeff Corwin Experience.

He spent the next six years working in the Herpetology and Ichthyology collections of the Massachusetts Natural History Collections at UMass, working under Richmond and Dr. Willy Bemis, a basal-fish biologist whose lab at UMass (now at Cornell) focused on animals such as sturgeons, bowfin, and lungfish.

Typhlonectes natans, a caecilian, and one of the taxa that Mark became fascinated with in college.

UMass also hired him as an undergraduate field technician on an ecological study in the uplands around the Quabbin Reservoir. For two years he monitored those sites almost daily, especially focused on Spotted Salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) and Wood Frog (Rana sylvatica) ecology. Witnessing a Spotted Salamander migration move over ice and snow, then later watching larvae metamorphose and leave the pools, was as formative as the classroom.

During those undergraduate years, Mark heard an invited lecture from Andy Blaustein on malformed amphibians in remote parts of the midwestern United States. It was an early account of what would later become recognized as the global amphibian decline, which now affects more than 40 percent of the world’s amphibians, according to the IUCN.

At the same time, he worked at Black Jungle in Turners Falls, a specialist poison frog and tropical plant shop, under owners Michael Wallitis and Richard Revis. From them, he learned captive management of a large collection of amphibians and propagation techniques across several genera of dendrobatid frogs. There he was also introduced to another favorite family, Phyllomedusidae — the leaf and monkey frogs.

In 1999 he completed two degrees: the B.A. in Sociology and a B.S. in Evolutionary Biology from UMass.

Ambystoma maculatum, the Spotted Salamander, is in many ways, Mark's 'gateway' species, as working with these salamanders in the field started a lifelong fascination with salamanders of the family Ambystomatidae, which includes the Flatwoods Salamanders and Axolotls.

He began an M.Sc. in Biology in Coral Gables in the O’Reilly Functional Morphology and Comparative Physiology Laboratory, working under Jim O’Reilly — one of the early-career scientists he had first met in the Brainerd lab. Mark’s committee included legendary southeastern biologists Whit Gibbons and the late George Dalrymple.

O’Reilly’s research centered on how limbless animals work. The lab held caecilians, legless lizards, amphisbaenids, fossorial, arboreal, and venomous snakes, as well as other animals with uncommon body plans.

Mark’s UM research was funded by a grant tied to Everglades restoration. The primary thesis asked how a locally ubiquitous native bufonid, the Oak Toad (Bufo quercicus), responds to restorative changes in hydrology in Everglades National Park. A second thesis followed the same species’ behavior, activity patterns, and circadian rhythms. Mark became quite enamored with these tiny toads — North America’s most diminutive.

Bufo (Anaxyrus) quercicus, the Oak Toad, is ubiquitous in sight and sound of Long Pine Key within Everglades National Park, FL.

He and his family moved to Atlanta so he could join the amphibian conservation program at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, among the first programs of its kind in the country. The ABG frog initiative had been started in the 1990s by Ron Gagliardo, but by the time Mark arrived in 2009 it was led by Danté Fenolio, a former O’Reilly labmate and dedicated conservationist now at San Antonio Zoo.

Danté brought him on to manage a rare collection of Panamanian frogs collected ahead of the chytrid fungus epidemic that was killing frogs in otherwise intact forest in central Panama. In 2005, staff from ABG and partner institutions, with support from the Panamanian government, moved animals out of the path of the fungus — work later compared by Joel Sartore to saving what you can from a burning building. Some of those frogs belonged to species not yet described. They were housed in a biosecure facility at ABG called the frog pod.

One of the extremely rare and imperiled species housed in the frog pod was Ecnomiohyla rabborum, Rabbs’ Fringe-limbed Tree Frog, described only in 2008. The last known female died in 2009, before Mark arrived later that year. The last two were males, one held at Zoo Atlanta and the other in Mark’s care at ABG. After the Zoo Atlanta frog passed away in 2012, the ABG animal — later named Toughie by Mark’s son, Anthony — was the last known member of the species on Earth. Toughie lived for 11 years in human care at ABG before passing away on 26 September 2016, roughly six weeks after Mark and Crystal founded Amphibian Foundation. For Mark, witnessing the actual extinction of a species was a profound experience that continues to drive how he leads AF today.

In August 2016, ABG closed the amphibian conservation program. The Panamanian frogs were returned to Panama. Without a plan to continue the native programs, including the Frosties, Mark and Crystal founded the Amphibian Foundation that week to take custody of the salamanders, keep the critical conservation work going, and ensure these animals would remain a top priority.

In late 2021 and early 2022, AF produced the first documented captive breeding of Frosted Flatwoods Salamander and, as a result, stood up the Flatwoods Salamander Conservation Breeding Working Group (frosty.AF), a multi-agency collaboration with some of the nation’s finest zoos and federal partners.

Mark drew the AF logo from the siredon — the larval form — of the Frosty, A. cingulatum.

Mark trained as a musician as seriously as he later trained as a biologist. In the mid- to late 1980s, he played bass, sang, and played harmonica in Misguided Youth, a band mentored by beloved Berkshire songwriter the late David Grover. In 1987, the group toured five cities in China — Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Beijing — including a concert at Fudan University, at a moment when the guitar had only recently become legal there. Misguided Youth was the first American rock band to perform in China, and the group later appeared on NBC’s Today show to discuss the milestone.

In 1990, Mark attended Berklee College of Music in Boston to study bass and sound engineering. That first semester, he severed the first and middle fingers of his right hand, which promptly ended the music degree. For the last few decades he has written, recorded, and produced music under the name mudpuppy at his own Neotenic Studios in Decatur.

Music, illustration, and amphibian biology remain, for him, one practice rather than three.