Everyone has a hobby. Trond Larsen's is photography.

As the Rapid Assessment Program director at Conservation International, Larsen spends his days organizing international teams of scientists to find and document wildlife infar-flung locales. His camera goes with him to the wild, and his photos – predominantly of the animals he encounters in the field – have appeared everywhere from NationalGeographic to The New Yorker.

But Larsen can claim one photographic achievement that few on Earth can rival: One of his photos is on money. A shot that Larsen captured of a small, rarely seen frog wasrecently selected to grace a banknote in Madagascar.

This is the unlikely story of how a scientist's zeal to find a frog "paid off."

Larsen managed to get within inches of the frog, who let him take several close-ups before hopping back into the undergrowth.

Given the importance of photography in nature conservation, it's no surprise that a scientist would carry a camera around. But Larsen has taken his nature photography to alevel few other researchers can match – and he is almost completely self-taught.

After his work trip to Madagascar, Larsen uploaded his frog shots to Conservation International's in-house photo database and forgot about them.

Two years later, Larsen received an email. It was from Conservation International's Madagascar office.

"They wrote me and said, basically, 'Hey, the government's interested in using your photo for a new banknote, would you be willing to let them use it?' "

To read the complete Conservation International Blog article, see:
The strange story of how one researcher's photo made itonto a banknote (https://blog.conservation.org/2019/01/the-strange-story-of-how-one-researchers-photo-made-it-onto-a-banknote/)

To read the complete Banknote News article, see:
Madagascar new notes (B332 - B335) confirmed introduced 18.09.2017(https://www.banknotenews.com/files/tag-madagascar.php)