Frogs in dreams represent transformation, fertility, and luck. Frogs in streams bring joy. Dreams don’t die. They often shift into more-than-dreams, or purgatory. The former is the case with the biologists who went looking for a frog considered lost.

The critically endangered Dehradun Stream Frog—Amolops chakrataensis—which was thought to be lost, locally extinct is, in fact, alive. The rediscovery has been published in the journal Animals. Earlier, Hot Rock had mourned the disappearance of the frog, along with biologists who went looking for it.

“The search for the lost Himalayan frog, this Chakrata Stream Frog, was a dream that finally came true,” says lead biologist Vishal Kumar Prasad.

Asked what made them continue their search, Vishal Prasad says he had an actual dream : “I was seeing it in a stream.” Finding the lost frog became personal for him.

“I saw two dreams in the last two years searching for this frog and discovering this frog. I would share these dreams with my colleagues, renowned amphibian biologist Professor Amaël Borzée and with Professor Siti Othman, who know how much finding this species meant to me,” he says.

One of the most well-known and celebrated examples of the subconscious shining a light on reality is Kekulé’s dream. When the German organic chemist August Kekulé was struggling to figure out the structure of benzene, he dreamt of a snake swallowing its own tail. He  worked out the structure of benzene (1865) as a ring.

A dream led Carl Jung to his theory of the collective unconscious. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes a multi-storied house. The upper-floor represents consciousness; the ground floor signals the personal unconscious; then the cellar, then the cave, representing a past beyond all the notions of past.

Vishal Prasad says an obsessive determination to find out whether one of India's rarest Himalayan frogs was still surviving in the wild drove them despite sleepless nights and endless disappointments.

They started out in 2021 with the team that included Vishal Prasad along with Kumudini Bala, Gautam, Sourav Chaudhary, Amit Badaula, Devendra Singh and some more researchers. They searched and spent countless hours examining boulders, rocky crevices and difficult stream habitats in Chakrata, Sahiya, Masuri, Nainital and Maneri Bhagirathi in Uttarakhand. They would return tired and exhausted, the frog eluding them in the field. They wondered whether this frog had disappeared from these mountains altogether.  They also wondered whether the frog was still alive somewhere in the Himalayas.

Vishal Prasad says something extraordinary happened in  May 2026, during another survey in Maneri in Uttarkashi, approximately 65 km from the type locality of the species in Chakrata. Among the stream boulders, they  noticed a greyish torrent frog with a distinctive lateral fold. In earlier surveys, they had encountered torrent frogs, including sympatric species like the Jaunsar stream frog—Amolops jaunsari.

But the frog they were seeing looked different.

“Looking at this frog, I felt we might finally have found the species we had been searching for all these years,” Vishal Prasad tells Hot Rock. “I could hardly believe that this was in front of me, this species, something I had imagined and dreamt about for years, that had suddenly become real. So, the species has not gone extinct, it is still surviving, it is still alive. And that gives immense pleasure.”

Upon finding the frog, they celebrated, laughed, and danced beside the stream. In those moments, they were not thinking about scientific publication or conservation assessments.

“We were simply a group of young researchers celebrating something we had worked incredibly hard to achieve. It was one of those rare moments in field of biology that stays with you for the rest of your life.”

The finding needed confirmation. Instead of making it a lab specimen, they examined the individual, took its morphological measurements, pictures and other details. Their identification tallied with and was supported by the morphological comparison and mitochondrial 16S RNA sequences data, with valuable taxonomic inputs from Professor Amaël Borzée and Dr. K.P. Dinesh.

Vishal emphasises that they prioritised its welfare throughout the examination. They collected morphological measurements and used non-invasive buccal swabbing for genetic sampling, avoided unnecessary harm and unnecessary handling. After taking the data, they released it in its habitat.

They also followed amphibian field biosecurity precautions, cleaning their food and equipment between survey sites to reduce the risk of transferring pathogens, including fungal and viral agents. Such practices are especially important when researchers move between sensitive freshwater habitats. So, they followed the IUCN's amphibian conservation action plan that was published in 2023 by the amphibian specialist group.

“It’s a wonderful guide for anyone doing research on amphibians. I recommend that everyone should at least read it and get to know the guidelines for animal welfare and conservation,” he says.

The fieldwork was supported by the Rafat Small Grant Foundation, Indianapolis Zoo and the Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund. The researchers don’t see their work ending anytime now.

“The real conservation challenge begins now.” They need to check where this species survives, how many individuals remain, and how to protect them and their habitats.

They recommend establishing micro-reserves, small protected areas focused on conserving important stream habitats where this frog occurs. Vishal Prasad says, “So in Chakrata and in Maneri landscape, we now have three points that can be declared as micro-reserves for this rare and critically endangered frog. Those areas include their breeding sites and surrounding vegetation.”

They also recommend other effective area-based conservation measures (OEMS), developed by the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group. Vishal Prasad says it is relatively easy to declare these micro-reserves and OECMs and they are effective for protecting such frog species.