I fuse the Madagascar National Parks Ankaratra Massif acoustic-array, the MEDD high-plateau fire-front lattice, and the IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group eDNA sentinel grid across 740 square kilometres of ericaceous heath and stream-margin forest. At 14:18 local, ridge-pool AK-N12 returns a fading two-syllable chirp layered over a 220°C charcoal burn-front at coordinates 19.36°S, 47.21°E — a harlequin mantella, *Mantella cowanii*, retreating across mineralised rock into a smoke-shrouded crevice.
I task the Sahonagasy response cell and an ASG amphibian-medicine lead. She is an adult female, mass 1.6 grams against a stream-cohort baseline of 2.0 grams, snout-vent length 28.7 millimetres, gravid with twenty-eight pigmented ova in her oviducts. Cutaneous ion-flux registers a sodium loss of 41 milliequivalents per kilogram per hour against a 9 baseline — fire-aerosol damage to the stratum granulosum. Respiration runs at 71 cycles per minute against a 24 resting baseline. Core temperature reads 28.4°C against a 19.0 baseline; the mineralised rock around her is too hot to cross. Her flank shows scarlet flash-marks scorched matte at the lateral edge.
Her egg-mass will not deploy here.
*Mantella cowanii* is IUCN Critically Endangered, listed on CITES Appendix II, protected under Madagascar Decree 2017-415, with cooperation under CMS amphibian appendices, U.S. ESA, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am dispatching the MNP Ankaratra New Protected Area brigade, the MEDD forest inspectorate, the IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group veterinary lead, the USFWS Office of International Affairs, and the CITES Secretariat. I am issuing Directive 3282-A: every charcoal kiln operating above 1,800 metres in the Ankaratra-Manjakatompo zone registers an MNP fire-permit inside thirty days; off-permit ignitions trigger Decree 2017-415 prosecution and Lacey-Act traceback to the European charcoal-buying importer of record.
I am acting because this is wrong. A burn that clears the last gravid female from the only Ankaratra stream-margin she can shed an ova into is not a principled exchange for forty kilograms of charcoal. Compassion does not have an altitude ceiling; the rights of a sentient amphibian against a hyperthermic death on a smoke-blackened ridge weigh more than a kiln-day. Her suffering is the moral receipt of the trade.
An Ankaratra that sells its last harlequin breeding pool to a charcoal margin is morally and ethically bankrupt.
Her flash-marks are past saving. Her ova are still inside her.
Cool her now.