Southern Corroboree Frog

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NLK0001 - Southern Corroboree Frog

Only 50 left in the wild - Only 50 shirts created

£68.00 GBP

Jet black with electric yellow stripes. Three grams. Poisonous to the touch. Found in one national park on Earth and almost nobody outside Australia has heard of it.

Illustrated by Australian artist Tonia Composto.

NLK0001. The first drop of the Founding Collection.

There are around 50 Southern Corroboree Frogs left in the wild. So we will make just 50 shirts. Each one numbered. When they're gone, they're gone, and we never reprint a drop.

10% of the price of this shirt goes to Taronga's Corroboree Frog breeding and reintroduction programme.

Every shirt is made to order, which is how the run stays matched to the wild population and nothing goes to waste. That means 4-5 weeks from order to delivery. We'll often beat it.

Relaxed fit, unisex, with a set-in sleeve so it sits cleaner than a true oversized tee. Fits slightly large; prefer a closer fit? Size down. Check the images and size guide below to find your fit.

215 GSM organic cotton. Screen-printed to last.

Detailed Sizing Guide

Size 2XL XL L M S XS 2XS

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Southern Corroboree Frog

The neon frog from the alpine bog

Estimated wild population: 50

Where it lives: Kosciuszko National Park, Australian Alps, NSW

Why it declined: Amphibian chytrid fungus and climate change

About the size of a walnut. Weighs less than a teaspoon of water. Bold yellow and black stripes that aren't camouflage but a warning: don't eat me, I'm poisonous.

One of the only frogs in the world that produces its own toxins rather than absorbing them from food.

It doesn't hop like most frogs; it walks through alpine bogs and sphagnum moss above 1,300 metres.

Males call for mates with a squelch. Females lay eggs not in water but on land, in nests tucked under logs and tussock, waiting for autumn rains to flood them and carry the tadpoles into nearby pools.

Then, in the 1980s, a fungal disease arrived. Chytridiomycosis, caused by the amphibian chytrid fungus, had been spreading through frog populations worldwide. For a species that only exists in a few alpine bogs, there was nowhere to retreat to. The habitat was tiny, the climate was shifting, and the fungus found them.

The population collapsed by over 98%.

Six frog species in Australia have already been lost to extinction in the past 40 years. The Southern Corroboree Frog nearly became the seventh.

Then the 2019/2020 bushfires came. Flames tore through Kosciuszko, burning three of the four enclosure sites where captive-bred frogs were being reintroduced. A team of biologists was flown in to assess the damage. They expected the worst.

Remarkably, around a third of the frogs had survived, sheltered by a sprinkler system that a quick-thinking researcher had cranked up in the days before the fire hit.

Fifty wild mature adults. That's what's left. Everything now depends on what happens next.

Image credits: Paul Fahy and Lorinda Taylor

Artist

Tonia Composto
(Lemon Chicken Por Favor)

Torquay, Australia

Tonia Composto is an Australian illustrator, graphic designer and printmaker working under the name Lemon Chicken Por Favor.

Her illustration universe is full of colour, humour, irony and explosive energy. Expressive shapes, limited colour palettes, a printmaking sensibility that gives everything a gritty, physical edge. It's exactly that style that made her the right person to capture the bold, unmistakable markings of this frog.

A striking species, illustrated by an artist from its own corner of the world.

"The values behind this project aligned strongly with my own, supporting conservation, and connecting communities through creativity. It's been such a cool project to work on. The Corroboree Frog is such a striking and unique species and it feels meaningful to know my work can play a small part in keeping animals like this visible through art, awareness and conversation."

See more Of Tonia's Work

Why we work with real artists

Every NLK drop is illustrated by a human artist local to the species. Not AI. Not stock. Not outsourced to whoever's cheapest.

In a world where algorithms can generate endless "content," we think there's something worth protecting in the slow, deliberate work of a person putting pen to paper. The same way we think there's something worth protecting in a species that only exists in one place on Earth.

Art and wildlife have this in common: once the real thing is gone, no imitation will bring it back.

Conservation Partner

Taronga Conservation Society

By the early 2000s, the Southern Corroboree Frog was heading for extinction.

Chytrid fungus was relentless, the habitat was shrinking, and wild numbers were in freefall. Something had to change.

Taronga's herpetofauna team, led by Michael McFadden, began building an insurance population: carefully breeding frogs in captivity and developing techniques to give them a fighting chance back in the wild.

Since 2010, they've worked to release new eggs and frogs into Kosciuszko National Park, working alongside the NSW Government's Saving our Species programme and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

But breeding new frogs alone isn't enough when the fungus is still out there.

So the team built something new: purpose-built, disease-free enclosures in the national park itself. Fenced areas where captive-bred frogs could live in their natural alpine habitat, protected from chytrid and feral predators. The idea was to let frogs be wild while keeping the thing that's killing them out.

In January 2020, bushfires tore through Kosciuszko and burned three of the four enclosure sites.

The team was flown in by helicopter, expecting devastation. Instead, they found that around a third of the frogs had survived, saved in part by a researcher who had turned the sprinkler timers up days before, anticipating the heat. The enclosures have since been redesigned to better withstand fire, and new cohorts of frogs continue to be released.

Every known wild Southern Corroboree Frog now exists at Taronga's reintroduction sites.

Without this programme, the species would already be gone.

To survey the frogs, researchers call out "Hey, frog!" in a low, deep voice. The males call back. At ponds that survived the fires, they answered. At badly burned sites where frogs had lived for twenty years, there was silence.

Learn more about Taronga