Marty Crump

Marty Crump is a behavioral ecologist who works with tropical amphibians in the areas of parental care, reproduction, territoriality, cannibalism, and tadpole ecology. She has published several books based on her research and experiences in tropical areas such as Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina including In Search of the Golden Frog—one of the first books to sound the alarm about the precipitous decline in amphibian populations around the globe.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Marty Crump’s interest in ecology and the environment were spurred by her childhood in the Adirondak mountains of upstate New York. While an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, she worked in the herpetology division of the Museum of Natural History, and after graduation, she participated in a faunal survey of amphibians and reptiles in a remote area of the upper Amazon Basin, Ecuador. She received her Masters at the University of Kansas for her research in Brazil concerning amphibians and reptiles, and did her doctorate research in Ecuador on frogs’ reproductive behavior. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, she became a professor of zoology at the University of Florida, where she continued her research in Ecuador, and also performed research in Costa Rica and Argentina, focusing on amphibian parental care, cannibalism, and reproduction.

Crump was the first individual to perform a long-term ecological study on a community of tropical amphibians in which she studied reproductive strategies in the neotropical anuran community at Santa Cecilia, Ecuador and recognized ten different modes of reproduction. These categories were later modified and adapted for all anuran reproductive patterns that scientists are currently aware of. Crump was also a pioneer in classifying variability in amphibian egg size as a function of habitat predictability. Her research, focusing on tropical tree frogs, shows that in species that breed in temporary ponds, individual females produce clutches that have a greater range of egg sizes while those breeding in permanent ponds have a very concentrated distribution, rarely deviating from the mean.

In 1997, she received the Distinguished Herpetologist Award from The Herpetologists’ League. She has also been involved in several conservation activities, including acting as a board member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as part of the DAPTF (Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force) from 2000 to 2010. She has held several editorial positions including Associate Editor of the Herpetological Natural History from 2000 to 2006 and has participated in several professional organizations including the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, and The Herpetologists’ League.

She currently works as adjunct professor in the Department of Biology and the Ecology Center at Utah State University and has a book which is due to be released for publication in 2014 entitled: Amphibians, Reptiles, and Humans: Cultural Perceptions and Conservation Consequences.