HONG KONG—Jodi Rowley spent two weeks last year fighting off leeches and munching on wild rats in the mountains of Vietnam in search of a 20 millimeter frog—an undiscovered forest-dwelling species she promptly named after a Hong Kong hedge fund manager.
Distressed-asset investor Robert Appleby hasn't yet met his namesake, Leptolalax applebyi, which weighs about one gram and makes a croaking noise that closely resembles a cricket's chirp.
"It's like being a very proud father," says the 48-year-old Mr. Appleby, who introduced the frog to a small gathering of fellow financiers and other friends over champagne and noodles at an art gallery in Hong Kong last Thursday.
The hedge-fund manager, who majored in zoology as an Oxford University undergraduate, spent three years as a science research assistant, as well as a 13-year stint at Lehman Brothers. Today, he runs a Hong Kong-based distressed-asset fund called ADM Capital Ltd. that he co-founded in 1996. The fund manages about US$1.6 billion in assets on behalf of endowments, foundations and pension funds. But Mr. Appleby's first love was always frogs and other wildlife.
On weekends, he goes bird-watching or makes treks into Hong Kong's country parks to hang out with "other moth nerds."
After a chance meeting four years ago with Ms. Rowley, now a 29-year-old amphibian biologist, Mr. Appleby found someone who shared his passion for frogs, and he committed to financing her fieldwork through a foundation he started with his business partners. Among the missions of the ADM Capital Foundation: supporting ecological projects in Asia where it could make a difference. "Some hedge-fund managers buy Ferraris," says Lisa Genasci, the foundation's director. "Robert has different passions."
Mr. Appleby says his inner scientist is able to live vicariously through Ms. Rowley's e-mailed updates from the field. "Jodi is very colorful and witty, and she's dedicated her life to the study of frogs," Mr. Appleby explained in a recent interview.
Ms. Rowley spends as many as nine months of the year "in a bog," leading teams of Vietnamese biology students through a maze of unexploded ordnance in the mountainous jungles of central Vietnam.
During a 2007 expedition, she began noticing a distinctive, cricket-like croak, and spent several days tracking down two of the little creatures. After trawling through 19th-century French texts and modern frog croak databases, she was confident she'd discovered a new species—one with unusual colorations on its smooth brown skin, including white nipple-like pectoral glands.
The findings were published last year in the scientific journal Zootaxa, and in gratitude to her patron, Ms. Rowley named the new species Leptolalax applebyi after Mr. Appleby, who she described as "an investor in biodiversity conservation and scientific capacity building in Asia."
Mr. Appleby says he plans to make his first trip to the mountain where Ms. Rowley first discovered the frog this summer, in hopes of being able to meet his namesake face to face. Success is far from assured: Ms. Rowley estimates there may only be several thousand Appleby frogs in existence, all living within a radius of five or 10 kilometers (three to six miles) of where she found them. She hasn't studied the species long enough to know its life span.
For Mr. Appleby, the trip itself is a chance to relive his zoologist dreams. "It's energizing," says Mr. Appleby. "If I got fired—if I fired myself—this is absolutely what I'd do."