Of the plans being readied in Hawaii to eliminate the frog, Senator McClintock added, ''If anyone suggested that here in Puerto Rico, they would be unanimously condemned.''īut while Senator McClintock said he missed the sound of the frog when he traveled, people here cannot relate. ''But after some time, it becomes music to your ears.'' ''Obviously, it's something that requires getting used to,'' said Kenneth McClintock, the minority leader of the Puerto Rican Senate, who hears the frogs from dusk to dawn at his home in the mountains south of San Juan. There, they are called coquí, a phonetic approximation of the sound they make. Unchecked, you never know what's going to happen.''īut the proposal to save Hawaii from being overrun by tree frogs has angered some Puerto Ricans, both here and as far away as Puerto Rico itself, where the frogs are omnipresent and often beloved. ''If you can get rid of them, you should,'' said Harry Ako, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Hawaii, who helped develop what is essentially a lethal cup of coffee, spiked by a pesticide intended for chrysanthemums.
It is considering killing the frogs the only way that has proved effective in a laboratory: by spraying acres of their borrowed habitat with concentrated caffeine. Indeed, an informal task force of federal and state officials has been convened to address the problem. And on an island that prizes its silence - Hawaiians, for example, rarely hit their car horns - these vocal visitors have not exactly been greeted with a flowery lei and a kiss on the cheek. Souza's neighborhood, known as Wahiawa, and several others here on Oahu. More than a hundred of the frogs, the oldest of which probably hitch-hiked to Hawaii on imported houseplants, have established a beachhead in the eucalyptus trees and moist gullies of Mrs. Souza and her neighbors awake has been far easier than silencing it. But identifying the nocturnal mating call that was keeping Mrs.
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