Here’s how travelers can help protect frogs in Costa Rica-Take a ‘frog safari’ through the jungle, while bringing awareness to vulnerable amphibians. – via Herp Digest

The glass frog’s translucent skin reveals organs in action, including the heart pumping blood.

BY LISA M. KRIEGER

A version of this story appeared in the January 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Costa Rica—which received a 2019 Champions of the Earth award, the United Nations’s highest environmental honor, for its role in protecting nature and combating climate change—hosts plenty of ecotours that offer zip-lining, mountain biking, kayaking, and birding.

But the nation is now discovering the value of a much smaller—and more threatened—natural asset. Lodges are building frog-friendly ponds; parks are leading frog-finding tours. Even the busy urban San José airport has a new frog-patterned carpet.

As the world gets hotter and drier, frogs’ future is in peril. Amphibians have survived the past four great extinctions, from ice ages to a meteor collision. But something is happening today that is causing amphibians to disappear at alarming rates.

An estimated 200 frog species have already gone extinct, and hundreds more may be on their way out. They’re experiencing death by a thousand cuts, succumbing to a lethal cocktail of factors that include pollution, climate change, and habitat loss and degradation. All of these factors can weaken the immune system of amphibians, and now a fungus is dealing the final blow.

Costa Rica has already lost its fabled golden toad—and experts fear for other species. Once frogs that eat insects are gone, an ecosystem loses its delicate balance.

It is not enough to lament their loss, says Kerry Kriger, founder of the nonprofit organization Save the Frogs. Frog-focused travel, he reasons, could strengthen the amphibian-human connection and spur advocacy to conserve some of the world’s most beautiful and charismatic creatures.

Where to find frogs

In a world that is rapidly losing amphibians, we set out to find them. Our tour group, which included a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, and a Lockheed Martin F-35 instructor pilot, was organized by Save the Frogs, an effort to support the growing number of parks and ecolodges that protect the vital habitats for these vulnerable creatures. “These are our goals: Find frogs. Go to places that have lots of frogs. Give these places money, so they keep saving habitat and keep having frogs,” said naturalist Michael Starkey.

We found ourselves deep in the middle of a Costa Rican jungle. Rain dripped down my face and muddy water swirled around my boots. I stabbed my flashlight into the darkness. This is where we’d find our frogs.

They beckoned us with a weird nocturnal orchestra: bass notes and piccolos, barks and whistles, croaks and hiccups. We had traveled thousands of miles for a glimpse, and they now surrounded us. Yet, maddeningly, they were impossible to see. Then, through the vine-draped trees, I heard excited voices and saw a scramble of flashlight beams.

“Right here. Under this leaf,” whispered Starkey. We crouched around a small shrub, squinting for a view. A tiny glass frog stared back at us.

Translucent and gemlike, this frog was soon joined by scores of other species sighted in the soggy days that followed: strawberry poison dart frogs, smoky jungle frogs, masked tree frogs, hourglass tree frogs, red-eyed tree frogs, snouted tree frogs, and others.

It is an addictive game, chasing eyes that glow like jewels in the dark. We have lists, like birders. We have our own jargon. We keep odd hours, swat mosquitoes, and wear closed-toed shoes to prevent snakebites.

Frog-spotting, like bird-watching, takes patience and perseverance. It’s an intimate view of nature, full of disappointment as well as discovery.

Your chances are best when conditions are worst. We picked July, the middle of the rainy season, when clouds swallow mountains whole. After several days, suitcases take on an aroma dubbed “jungle funk.”

It’s not essential to have a guide, but recommended, especially if your frog-finding skills are rusty. Starkey, a Sacramento native with a giant salamander tattooed on his arm, has lifelong expertise in scanning leaves, stems, and the edges of ponds.

Our trip had started on the outskirts of San José at Hotel Bougainvillea. Several small ponds in its 10-acre gardens were built specifically as breeding habitat for endangered species such as Forrer’s leopard frog and the brilliant forest frog.

Then we prowled the leaf litter in forests around La Quinta Sarapiquí Lodge, two hours north of San José, finding smoky jungle frogs. Built on the site of a cattle farm, this family-owned lodge is creating wild gardens as a habitat to attract frogs, butterflies, small mammals, and birds.

Along the slow and muddy Sarapiquí River, we boated past crocodiles that looked irritable as they watched us, only their eyes and nostrils above the surface. Iguanas gazed down from their treetop perches.

The week became a game of wildlife bingo. At the Arenal Oasis Eco Lodge, in the mountain town of La Fortuna, our night tour yielded 13 different frog species. Guides, like those on the grand safaris of the Serengeti, communicate by phone; when they find an interesting creature, everyone rushes for a glimpse.

Wildlife discoveries

Rainmaker, a reserve closer to the Pacific coast, is cherished for its role in the rediscovery of a presumed extinct species of harlequin frog. Once owned by a local rice farmer, the land was in danger of being clear-cut. Now it’s a private sanctuary at the end of a long and bumpy dirt road, hosting small groups for tours in search of early birds and late night frogs. But we loved it most for its incongruous microbrewery, Perro Vida, which crafts beer from mountain spring water.

In the dark, we hiked across the preserve’s suspension bridges and up steep trails built with old tires, stopping to peer into small holes, where we spied strange, secretive yellow-spotted tropical night lizards.

Each morning, we awoke with the birds and watched brilliantly colored tanagers gobble down melons at nearby feeders. Three species of kingfisher plied local waters. Assemblages of swallows crisscrossed the sky looking for prey. There were trogons and toucans, curassows and woodpeckers. Hummingbirds hovered around flowers, like tiny emerald and vermilion fighter planes.

During the long, steamy afternoons we tramped through pristine forests, marveling at the processions of leafcutter ants. Butterflies—huge Disneyesque creatures, with iridescent wings—fluttered about. We spotted alligator lizards and a Cope’s racer snake.

Every evening, as other tourists sipped after-dinner drinks, we donned ponchos and boots and equipped ourselves with flashlights and cameras wrapped in plastic bags.

Once we made the chilling discovery of a poisonous pit viper—bright yellow, like a toxic banana—up in the branches, suspended over our trail. Returning to safety, we celebrated the sighting with a toast.

Then came unexpected news: Guide Carlos Chavarria heard reports of a resplendent quetzal—the most iconic bird of the rainforest—at a nearby ridge. We rushed to join a sunrise pilgrimage. The wait on the steep ledge felt interminable, with only breeze-ruffled branches to break the tense silence. Then the big bird suddenly arrived on a nearby avocado tree, greeted by gasps and the clatter of camera shutters.

One evening, scanning a pond as dusk descended and the frogs’ chorus reached a crescendo, we saw something glare back at our flashlights’ beam. It was a pair of eyes. There are 149 frog species in Costa Rica; so far, we’d seen 22. Was this another?

Yes. It was a Vaillant’s frog, strong and sturdy. Starkey picked it up, and we gathered around in admiration. Then he loosened his gentle grip, and it leaped to freedom. Silently I bade it good luck and prayed that many future generations would follow.

Searching for frogs in the jungles of Borneo – via Herp Digest

Borneo’s jungle feels full of life during daylight, but it’s at night — when its wild denizens are on the hunt for food — that the forest really comes alive.October 6,2019

By Charlotte Wigram-Evans

Published in the Adventure guide, distributed with the October 2019 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

Darkness comes quickly in the jungle. It snakes around the branches of the acacia tree, rises from the crevices between buttress roots and envelops the mushrooms puffing up from the ground like clouds. It flows up the ironwood tree, obscuring the vines that hold its trunk in their slow, crushing embrace. It comes without warning, as though the sun has simply been plucked from the sky. And it’s only then, when it’s as black as obsidian, that the jungle wakes up.

I peer hopelessly into the gloom, my eyes straining for any signs of life emanating from the makeshift camp I’d trekked to earlier that day. My guides may be silent, but the jungle has turned the volume up to full blast; cicadas scream, bats squawk and the babble of a nearby steam is interrupted by deep, rhythmic belches — giant river frogs. It’s these monstrous burps that seem to rouse the group from their afternoon kip. Suddenly, Kajan’s voice roars out, his words escaping into the night: “Right, frogging time!”

I scramble frantically for my torch. Is this some kind of bizarre fairytale? Am I being led out into the wild to kiss frog after frog until I find a prince? My fingers find the plastic switch, and grinning faces suddenly appear above me: Munati, Rantau, Dali and Kajan, four members of the Iban tribe that has eked out an existence from Borneo’s forests for centuries. Their deep understanding of the jungle is unmatched. 

The amphibians, it turns out, will be my dinner, not my date. Rantau hands me a plastic bag and I wade out into a stream behind him as he regales me with tales of his frogging prowess. “I held the record in my longhouse for the most caught in one night,” he says gleefully. “More than 100.”

In the feeble beam of my torch, I watch as his hands plunge into the water ahead of me, and emerge with a frog as big as teapot. Its bulbous, saucer-sized eyes stare at me ruefully, before it’s dropped into a bag already bulging with others.

I splash on, creatures that have been ensconced in tree trunks all day peering down at me from the canopy. The paper-thin wings of a lesser bamboo bat hold me spellbound, before they unfurl to reveal a tiny, fang-toothed face, lamp-like eyes aglow. A few slippery metres further downstream I spot a jumping spider, busy weaving its web.

The rainforest itself feels more alive in the blackness, as though the trees have woken up with the wildlife. Sinewy vines seem intent on stroking my shoulders, leaves rustle around my ankles, branches lean out over the stream, bowing under their own weight. I’m so in awe of this ecosystem that Kajan has to make regular U-turns, dashing back to ensure the jungle hasn’t claimed me for its own.

Unsurprisingly, my bag remains firmly frogless. “No stew for you,” Dali jokes, holding his bounty aloft like a trophy. “I got 15; Rantau still beat me, though, he’s on 20. We’ll stew them with lemongrass and ginger back at camp,” Kajan says, as we turn around and head upstream. “A true Iban delicacy.”

Food is the last thing on my mind, however — I’ve spotted an orangutan nest ahead, an expertly folded throne of palm fronds so fresh it might have been vacated only moments before. Was the great ape watching me from the trees, just out of reach of my torch beam? Two more eyes in the darkness, following my every move.

Giant river frogs are a delicacy for the Iban tribe, who set off at night in search of the amphibians. 

Jungle survival guide

Shelter

Keeping dry is crucial in the humid jungle. The easiest way to build a basic shelter is to find a long straight branch and lean it against a tree, propping up shorter branches down its length. Finally, cover it all with leaves and you’re good to go.

Equipment

The Iban would never dream of setting off into the jungle without, at the very least, a machete and a lighter. If a machete is unavailable to you, a penknife will suffice — a blade is essential when preparing food and splicing dry wood for a fire.

Water

Streams aren’t the only source of water in the jungle. Bamboo collects water in its stem, which can be accessed simply by bending the top so it flows out. Any of the giant leaves in the jungle can easily be fashioned into a makeshift cup to collect rainwater.

Food

Hunting requires expertise, so your jungle diet will be mainly plants, fruit, insects and fish, frogs, grubs and termites. Mushrooms can be lethal, so avoid if in any doubt. Also, rub leaves on skin and lips before eating to see if there’s any reaction.

Danger

From poisonous snakes to malaria-carrying mosquitos, the jungle can be a perilous place. Fashion a sturdy stick into a spear for self defence. When building a shelter, look for a dry clearing — this will keep you safe from leeches and falling branches.

How to do it

Borneo Adventure offers trips to Batang Ai National Park to visit the Iban tribe at Nanga Sumpa Lodge and explore the rainforest. Three nights with all meals from £250 per person, excluding flights. 

An island haven for frogs in a sea of extinctions. Plan to keep New Guinea's frogs safe from the species-destroying chytrid fungus - via Herp Digest

Date: June 3, 2019

Source: Macquarie University

New Guinea is one of the only places in the world where frogs are safe from the species-destroying chytrid fungus. An international team of scientists has published a new paper that shows how to keep it that way, but they need help to carry out their plan.

The chytrid fungus has wiped out more than 90 frog species around the world, and it's driving hundreds more towards extinction. New Guinea -- the world's largest tropical island, and home to 6% of all known frog species -- is one of the last remaining refuges from the deadly infection.

A team of scientists led by researchers from Macquarie University and the University of New England in Australia think they know how to keep the island's frogs safe, but they need support to establish a long-term program of monitoring and conservation.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the group of 30 experts from Australia, the USA, China, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea calls for urgent action.

"You don't often spot a conservation disaster before it happens and get the chance to stop it," says Deborah Bower of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, who is the first author of the article. "We know what needs to be done.”

The infectious chytrid fungus has been described as the most destructive pathogen known to science. It has destroyed more than 90 species of frog entirely and caused declines in almost 500 more.

The international pet trade helped the chytrid fungus spread rapidly from its origins in East Asia over recent decades, and it now infects frogs on every continent. It is one of the key reasons why 40% of the world's frog species now face the threat of extinction.

New Guinea's tropical climate and hundreds of native frog species make it an ideal environment for chytrid. But field tests have so far found no traces of the killer fungus.

"A lot of New Guinea's frogs are closely related to Australian species that have been devastated by chytrid, so we expect they would be just as vulnerable," says Simon Clulow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who leads the research team.

"Other New Guinea frog species are unusual because they hatch from eggs as fully formed frogs, rather than going through a tadpole stage, and we don't know how chytrid will affect them.”

The team estimates that around 100 species of frog would be in danger if chytrid reaches New Guinea, and their decline could have huge impacts across the ecosystem as they are predators of insects and other small creatures but also prey for larger animals.

The research team includes international experts in frog conservation -- including Lee Berger, the Australian who first discovered the chytrid fungus and showed it was responsible for frog species declines and extinctions -- alongside local researchers with deep knowledge of the environment of New Guinea.

They have been studying frogs in New Guinea since 2015, and have already started working with zoos, universities and the Papua New Guinea government to build a program to keep captive frogs and store their sperm and eggs to preserve genetic diversity.

The team has developed a 5-step program of preparation, prevention, detection, response and recovery to keep the deadly fungus off New Guinea and to minimise the impact if it does arrive.

As well as preserving New Guinea's frogs, the program would build local capacity in science, and disease surveillance and diagnosis that will have applications for animal and public health.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Macquarie University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Deborah S Bower, Karen R Lips, Yolarnie Amepou, Stephen Richards, Chris Dahl, Elizah Nagombi, Miriam Supuma, Lisa Dabek, Ross A Alford, Lin Schwarzkopf, Mark Ziembicki, Jeffrey N Noro, Amir Hamidy, Graeme R Gillespie, Lee Berger, Carla Eisemberg, Yiming Li, Xuan Liu, Charlotte K Jennings, Burhan Tjaturadi, Andrew Peters, Andrew K Krockenberger, Dillian Nason, Mirza D Kusrini, Rebecca J Webb, Lee F Skerratt, Chris Banks, Andrew L Mack, Arthur Georges, Simon Clulow. Island of opportunity: can New Guinea protect amphibians from a globally emerging pathogen? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2019; DOI: 10.1002/fee.2057

New frog species discovered

JULY 18, 2019

by University of Central Florida

UCF student Veronica Urgiles has helped describe two new frog species discovered in Ecuador, and she named one of them after one of her professors.

Urgiles and an international team of researchers just published their findings in the journal ZooKeys.

"Frogs are by far my favorite," said Urgiles, who is pursuing a master's degree in biology. "So, getting to describe and name two of them is terrific. I have been looking at these frogs for years now, so going over the whole process of observing them in their habitats and then analyzing them and comparing them under the microscope, to finally naming them is a long, but very satisfying journey."

Urgiles, a 2017 Fulbright scholar and the lead author, said she chose to attend UCF for its integration of genetics and genomics in biodiversity research and the emphasis on real-world application. She works with Assistant Professor Anna Savage who specializes in species diversity based on molecular analyses.

Continued

Frogs find refuge in elephant tracks

Study says pachyderm puddles are amphibian condos

Date:  June 4, 2019

Source:  Wildlife Conservation Society

Frogs need elephants. That's what a new WCS-led study says that looked at the role of water-filled elephant tracks in providing predator-free breeding grounds and pathways connecting frog populations.

Publishing in the journal Mammalia, the researchers found that rain-filled tracks of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) were filled with frog egg masses and tadpoles. The tracks can persist for a year or more and provide temporary habitat during the dry season where alternate sites are unavailable. Trackways could also function as "stepping stones" that connect frog populations.

This study was made available online in September 2018 ahead of final publication in print in May 2019.

The researchers made their observations in Myanmar's Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary.

Elephants are widely recognized as "ecosystem engineers," where they extensively modify vegetation through browsing, trampling, and seed dispersal, and convert large amounts of plant biomass into dung that is an important nutrient input for terrestrial and aquatic systems. At smaller scales, local plant species richness is enhanced when elephants open gaps in the forest canopy, browsing damage to trees creates refuges for small vertebrates (lizards and small mammals), and dung piles provide food for a diversity of beetles.

Read on

Study shows temperature alters developing nervous system in frogs

by UC Davis, 5/23/19

The external growth of frogs from egg to larvae enable researchers to explore how genes and the environment interact, including the role that temperature-sensitive channels play in nervous system development and disease. Credit: UC Davis Health

Can the environment affect how the spinal cord develops specialized circuitry, or is that process hardwired, following prescribed genetic instructions turned on early in the embryo?

A UC Davis study that compared the effects of cold and warm temperatures on the development of frog eggs into larvae found that environmental temperature significantly changes how the nervous system develops.

The study, which appears online May 23 in the journal Current Biology, found environmental temperature activated temperature-sensitive channels, influencing gene expression and altering neurodevelopment. The research, while conducted in frogs, has parallels across species, including humans.

"We found that the temperature-sensitive channel TRPM8 drives changes in the developing nervous system, allowing frogs to adapt to the environment," said Laura Borodinsky, professor of physiology and membrane biology at UC Davis School of Medicine and study senior author.

"Larvae grown in cold temperatures had more neurons responsible for movement—a crucial function that better equips young frogs to escape predators and other potential dangers," she said. "They also had larger muscle mass and a stronger swim response than those reared in warmer temperatures when tested at cold temperatures.”

Temperature important for neurodevelopment in humans

Temperature is an important factor in the development of the nervous system in humans. Newborns, especially premature babies, do not develop the ability to regulate body temperature until a few months after birth or even longer. Studies also suggest that fever during pregnancy may affect the developing brain and nervous system, increasing the risk of autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

Borodinsky believes when temperature changes are sudden and occur during critical periods of development—or when molecular mechanisms to adapt to these changes are not working—disruptions in nervous system development can affect health.

Temperature channels as a way the environment changes gene expression

Temperature-sensitive channels belong to a diverse family of ion channels, TRP channels, that respond to a range of conditions. While some TRP channels are temperature sensors, others are sensitive to pain, pH, touch, light and sound. These cellular pathways that allow organisms to sense temperature are well-conserved through evolution and present across species.

For the study, Kira A. Spencer, first author of the paper and a former graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate program at UC Davis, raised fertilized frog eggs at cold or warm temperatures in Petri dishes. At the larval stage, they measured responses to light touch and swimming responses, and number of spinal motor neurons. They assessed the dependence of spontaneous electrical activity, which drives many aspects of neuronal differentiation, on temperature, as well as the genetic factors that regulate developing spinal cord cells and the role of the cold-temperature channel TRPM8.

"We found that the cold-temperature sensitive channel TRPM8 mediates the developmental changes that give frog larvae an advantage and allow them to function optimally in cold temperatures," Spencer said.

"Our results provide insight into how the environment influences gene expression during development, and point to a promising avenue for exploring how genes and the environment interact, including the role that other TRP channels play in nervous system development and disease."

Andrew Crawford: Colombia’s frogs face “massacre” with illegal trafficking – Herp Digest

By Richard Emblin - May 24, 2019

Photo: Richard Emblin, The City Paper Bogota.com

Andrew Crawford is Associate Professor of biology at Universidad de los Andes and member of the Smithsonian Tropical Research institute. His research on amphibian evolutionary genetics covers plenty of terrain in Colombia, from the Pacific coast with its poison dart frogs to the discovery with a team of scientists of a new species in the cloud forests of the high Andes. As a frog expert, Crawford spoke with The City Paper about the many threats facing this species in the country.

The City Paper (TCP): Andrew, what motivated you to come to Colombia and study amphibians?

Andrew Crawford (AC): When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago there was a programme called the Organization of Tropical Studies that connects students with Costa Rica. That got me to Costa Rica, and those were the coolest two months of my life. That was in 1995, but I still needed a thesis, and as I like frogs, and they are easy to study, I found out about the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in the former Canal Zone of Panama. I applied for a fellowship for a few months, and finished my Ph.D. on the frogs of Costa Rica. I learned a lot about the history of these organisms across Central America, but the more I studied them, the more I needed samples from Panama and Mexico. Then, I started putting the whole story of dirt frogs together. That’s not their scientific name, but an appropriate one, because they look like dirt, live in the dirt, are as common as dirt, and as old as dirt. You won’t see them in any calendars.

TCP: So, your Central America experience was key to your Colombia connection.

AC: When I would catch one frog on one side of Costa Rica, I would ask myself, where could the closest relative be? Nicaragua maybe, Honduras, Mexico? My research started expanding out. Back in Panama with my post-doctoral research at STRI and National Science Foundation, the perspective started getting bigger. I asked myself that if I really wanted to solve the larger problem of the relationships between specific species, what place could be next? Colombia. Also, at the Smithsonian in Panama, there were lots of Colombian students with very good reputations. I kept thinking to myself: “Wow, these Colombian students are sharp.” Befriending one affiliated with Los Andes University, in 2005, I was invited to Bogotá and by chance, met another “gringo” associated with Fulbright. We were mere postdocs who didn’t have real jobs. But, it was easier to get a fellowship then, than now. Thirteen years ago, researchers in the United States were not “hot” on Colombia: drugs, kidnapping, all that. In 2006, I applied to be a Visiting Professor at Los Andes, and was given a desk.

TCP: Did the security risk affect your first outings to the jungle to study frogs?

AC: I am not an extreme adventure guy by any means. I want to do what’s safe. If someone said to me then, “don’t go there,” I didn’t. I wasn’t keen on pushing the envelope. I did manage to go to Quibdó and Arací on the Pacific coast. That was highly adventurous for me because the Lonely Planet didn’t cover the Chocó. When I finally got there, I said: “Wow, I’m actually beyond the Lonely Planet!”

TCP: What did you find among the frog population of the Chocó back then?

AC: When I was living in the former Canal Zone, I would hear the red-eye tree frog every wet season from behind my house. In Arací, I heard the same calling. When I finally caught one, it had a very different color pattern. This was a cool discovery that nobody reported, and knew that I could use some of my Panama research to help guide me to what was new in the Chocó. Colombia became part of a bio-geographic strategy with its mix of organisms from the north and others from the south. If I had gone directly from Costa Rica to the Amazon, everything would have been new. If you know your Central American frogs, it won’t help you in the Amazon. Frogs are kind of stay at home guys.

TCP: Had you imagined, once in Colombia, the level of frog biodiversity?

AC: Colombia has 800 amphibians and most of them are frogs. The country is number two in the world in terms of its frog diversity; and, also wins for having the world’s most poisonous frog: the all-yellow dart frog. The Dendrobates leucomelas has been very well documented along the Pacific and gets all the attention, but there are many more because anything that has poison and is colorful is also a dart frog. If you see a bright colorful frog in the daytime stay away from it.

TCP: When biologists refer to a “dangerous” frog, what can happen if you come across one during a hike in the rainforest?

AC: It will kill anyone who tries to eat it or if the toxin gets under your skin. It won’t attack you like a scorpion. The dart frog is pure defense. There were several cases recently at Bogotá’s International Airport of people smuggling these frogs in suitcases. There’s a huge market out there for these “pets.” Sadly, 90% of them die before they reach their destination. It’s a massacre, but collectors are willing to pay a lot of money for a new color pattern, species and the most poisonous.

TCP: After your first trip to Colombia in 2005, you set your sights on permanent tenure at Los Andes University. How did this happen?

AC: The Fulbright visiting professor deal was for just one semester, but as they paid so well, I stayed for the year. But when I got to back to Panama, I realized Los Andes was nice, Colombia was a great country and I found the regionalism tremendous. I started applying to come back, and got an offer in 2006. My aim was – and still is – to use frogs to study the origins of biodiversity. That’s a great question for Colombia and a classic question in biology. Why are there so many species?

TCP: How old is the frog community?

AC: Through genetics, we can understand the origin of all species, and as frogs are sisters to the rest of the tetrapods, reptiles, birds and mammals, this makes them very old. In fact, they haven’t changed a lot in 150 million years. When you see a frog fossil, it is very clearly a frog.

TCP: Biodiversity is a term that’s used a lot in this country, but are we taking our biodiversity for granted?

AC: If we give up on conservation and don’t save our frogs, there’s one possible outcome: they’re gone! The situation is bad because trafficking is getting worse. In a post-conflict, it’s much easier to get to these frogs, and as deforestation accelerates, we are losing entire populations. The disease has also claimed many species. All these factors without thinking about how bad herbicides and pesticides are.

TCP: There’s an anecdote regarding your role with the sticker album Jet, very popular among children in this country. Can you explain?

AC: I helped with the genetic analysis of the Pristimantis dorado, a small golden frog native to the forests of Colombia. Before it appeared in the Chocolates Jet album, Mauricio Rivera-Correa of the University of Antioquia named it after mythical El Dorado, because it seemed a nice way of saying that with the post-conflict, the new riches of Colombia is the “Green economy” – our biodiversity.

TCP: We have spoken about threats to the frog population at home, but what is happening globally?

AC: In the world, we just hit 8,000 frogs officially. What is most interesting, however, is that to find a new mammal is something that doesn’t happen every day, and as the numbers of new species is going down every year, amphibians are bucking the trend. The number of new frogs we are finding has not slowed at all – it just goes up and up. It would be irresponsible to try and guess when this might stop – but, so far – one could easily imagine 9,000 or 16,000 frog species in the world. And in Colombia, our 800 frogs could easily double.

TCP: Yet, it seems that frogs are suffering from so many external factors.

AC: Yes, frogs are getting hit in many different ways. It really is a disaster. Many of our micro-endemic species haven’t been seen again in the high-altitude páramos. In the mountains, we have lost forests to cattle ranching and crop clearing. Another cause for declining populations is the chytrid fungal disease that wipes out half the frogs that get infected. If it’s not the fungus, another threat can be fish farming. Our frogs face one insult after another.

TCP: As a leading expert on amphibians, what are your more recent discoveries?

AC: I have been doing a lot of research on how sensitive frogs are to the environment along Colombia’s Caribbean coast. They live in extreme environments with harsh summers and very little water. Some of the questions we are asking ourselves are: How do they survive? Where do they come from? Did they move down from Central America, or did they live in the Amazon and crossed over the Andes? What I can tell you from the radiation of the frog population is that the vast majority on the planet come from southern South America. We are finding an unexpected connection between Colombia’s coastal frogs with those in Chile and Argentina.

TCP: Have you seen at Los Andes an increase among biology students who want to study frogs?

AC: Reporting on frogs gets people excited, and for some reason, in my field of research – Herpetology – there are more students studying frogs than other creepy crawlies. Frogs tend to attract the press due to the many threats they face.

TCP: Your name was recently mentioned with two large seizures at El Dorado airport involving animal traffickers. Why did the National Police call on you?

AC: The National Police wanted to check the frogs which survived fungal disease before putting them back in the wild. My laboratory did the checking. As the yellow dart frog only exists in one tiny patch in Colombia, it can be collected out of existence, and the police know where they exist. It seemed that someone close to the traffickers snitched as they were leaving the forest with suitcases.

The weird thing is with these frogs is that they have distinctive patterns depending on which forest they inhabit. So, the authorities can know where animal traffickers are operating depending on the frogs they have caught.

TCP: Do you think there is a concerted effort by the Ministry of Environment and National Police to protect frogs against traffickers?

AC: Awareness of the problem is definitely on the increase, and I am involved with developing the Amphibian Action Plan of the Ministry of the Environment. A key element to the Plan de Acción de Anfibios is to combat illegal trade. We have to assume that with these busts, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

TCP: Do communities try and stop traffickers from taking their frogs?

AC: It’s very imperative to tell a community that they have “special frogs,” in order to give them a sense of pride. Secondly, there are pilot projects to protect certain species through sustainable harvesting, and this can bring in money for vulnerable communities.

TCP: So you are not very optimistic about the future of Colombia’s “kermits”?

AC: When I came to Colombia 13 years ago, I would say: “Wow, look at all this biodiversity.” Then, someone who had been here 30 years would respond: “Andrew, this is nothing compared to what was once here.” It comes down to shifting baselines with each generation. I would like to be able to say something optimistic, but as far as conservation of our frogs is concerned, I think things will get worse before they get better.

Expert explains key role of frogs in healthy ecosystems

MARCH 29, 2019

by Penny Jones, University of New South Wales

Dr. Jodi Rowley explains why frogs are so vital for healthy ecosystems, how she is working to conserve them and the positive impact she has already made to the study of amphibians in Southeast Asia.

Dr. Jodi Rowley has dedicated much of her career to illuminating what she calls 'the black hole' in the world's knowledge of amphibian life in South-East Asia. Her original impetus started following the release of the 'Global Amphibian Assessment' in 2004 which was published by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

"The report was the first comprehensive examination of how amphibians are doing on a world level and highlighted the fact that they are in a lot of trouble. Today we estimate that an incredible 42 percent of all known species of amphibians are threatened with extinction," she says.

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Five new frog species from Madagascar – via Herp Digest

Smallest is hardly longer than a grain of rice.

March 28, 2019

Source: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Summary: Scientists have named five new species of frogs found across the island of Madagascar. The largest could sit on your thumbnail, the smallest is hardly longer than a grain of rice.

Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology have named five new species of frogs found across the island of Madagascar. The largest could sit on your thumbnail, the smallest is hardly longer than a grain of rice.

Madagascar, an island a little larger than mainland France, has more than 350 frog species. This number of recognized species is constantly rising, and many of the newly named species are very small.

Mark D. Scherz, a PhD candidate at LMU Munich, and Dr. Frank Glaw, Head of the Herpetology Section at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, together with colleagues at the Technical University of Braunschweig and the University of Antananarivo have named five new species of tiny frogs found across the island. Their study appears in the online journal PLOS ONE.

The five new species belong to a group of frogs commonly referred to as 'narrow-mouthed' frogs, a highly diverse family found on every continent except Antarctica and Europe. Although most narrow-mouthed frogs are small to moderately large, many are tiny. In fact, the group includes the smallest frog in the world -- Paedophryne amauensis from Papua New Guinea, mature specimens of which reach a length of only 7.7 mm. What's remarkable is that, in the smallest frogs, "miniaturization" has evolved independently -- often several times within a single region, as highlighted in this new study. Three of the new species belong to a group that is wholly new to science, which the authors have formally dubbed Mini. The other two new species, Rhombophryne proportionalis and Anodonthyla eximia, are also just 11-12 mm long, and are much smaller than their closest relatives.

"When frogs evolve small body size, they start to look remarkably similar, so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are," says Mark D. Scherz, lead author on the new study. "Our new genus name, Mini, says it all. Adults of the two smallest species Mini mum and Mini scule are 8-11 mm long, and even the largest member of the genus, Miniature, at 15 mm, could sit on your thumbnail with room to spare."

Finding tiny frogs in the leaf litter is hard work. "Calling males often sit one or two leaves deep and stop calling at the slightest disturbance," says Frank Glaw. "It can take a lot of patience to find the frog you are looking for."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Mark D. Scherz, Carl R. Hutter, Andolalao Rakotoarison, Jana C. Riemann, Mark-Oliver Rödel, Serge H. Ndriantsoa, Julian Glos, Sam Hyde Roberts, Angelica Crottini, Miguel Vences, Frank Glaw. Morphological and ecological convergence at the lower size limit for vertebrates highlighted by five new miniaturised microhylid frog species from three different Madagascan genera. PLOS ONE, 2019; 14 (3): e0213314 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213314

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Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. "Five new frog species from Madagascar." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 March 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190328112519.htm>.

Dig for Britain: householders urged to build ponds to help frogs, newts and hedgehogs

Sightings of frogs have slumped in recent years 

 Sarah Knapton, science editor

12 MARCH 2019 • 6:00AM

Householders are being urged to dig ponds in their gardens, or fill washing up bowls with water, to help stem the decline in frogs, newts and hedgehogs.

The Wildlife Trusts and Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) are concerned that the disappearance of ponds is damaging wildlife.

Recent figures from the RSPB showed frog sightings have fallen by 15 per cent while toads have declined 28 per cent since 2014.

Ponds are a vital habitats and water sources for amphibians and small mammals but housebuilders now rarely include them in garden designs, and the number of municipal ponds has halved from one million to 500,000 in the past 150 years.

Health and safety fears has led to many ponds being filled in in recent years following calls from the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT) and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa).

Continued