'Old-fashioned fieldwork' puts new frog species on the map

Scientists lists characteristics that set Atlantic Coast leopard frog apart

Date:  November 26, 2018

Source:  SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Months of old-fashioned scientific fieldwork -- more than 2,000 surveys of chirping frog calls, hundreds of photos of individual frogs and tiny tissue samples taken from them -- has helped define the range and unique characteristics of the recently discovered Atlantic Coast leopard frog.

A study published this month in the journal PLOS ONE pinpointed the frog's range along the Eastern Seaboard, its unusual call and a list of traits distinguishing it from the more common northern and southern leopard frogs. "We are essentially writing the field guide page for this frog. It's much of the information you'd want," said Matthew Schlesinger, a zoologist with the New York Natural Heritage Program based at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York.

Given the challenges associated with hearing one frog and then finding and processing it in an expansive wetland, the researchers essentially triangulated their way to the information they were seeking. "Hearing a particular frog call, then going out, finding and catching it is pretty much an impossible task," Schlesinger said. "It doesn't happen that way." So, based on call surveys, they documented which frog species lived in which wetlands, then caught individual frogs from those wetlands for genetic and photographic analysis.

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