Thanks to a group of indigenous people from a Peruvian town in the Amazon, a team of biologists has been able to find this small amphibian in the Amazon jungle of Loreto (Peru), through the beep it emits as a call. The new species, named tapir frog ( Synapturanus danta ) due to its long snout similar to the Mesoamerican tapir , is quite small, as it is less than a centimeter long.
“These frogs are really hard to find, and that leads to them not being studied as much,” said study co-author Michelle Thompson, a researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. “It is an example of the hidden diversity of the Amazon and it is important to document it to understand how the local ecosystem works.”
According to experts, the shape of its body and its general appearance seem to be perfectly adapted to burrowing in the soft soils of Amazonian peat bogs. It has a reddish-brown coloration that makes it easily indistinguishable from the land on which it moves. With this added difficulty, this tiny burrowing frog was able to be located by tracking its distinctive “beeps” through peat bogs and with the help of local guides.
Guides who were familiar with the frogs led the researchers to areas of peat bogs, wetlands carpeted with nutrient-rich grass made from decaying plant matter. S. danta was found during a rapid inventory led by scientists from the Field Museum, a research program in which scientists spend a few weeks in an area of the Amazon.
The team searched at night, when the frogs were most active.
“It looks like a caricature of a tapir, because it has a big, stocky body with a tiny, pointy head,” says Thompson. But, despite his cute appearance, he was very difficult to find. “Frogs are small, quarter-sized, they’re like brown, they’re underground, and they’re fast . You know these little frogs are somewhere underground, but you just don’t see them jumping around .”
After several nights waiting until 2-3 in the morning, they heard a call and created an imaginary one meter by one meter square and started digging with their hands to find them. And there they were.
As well as finding adult specimens of the frogs, the team (who managed to capture three tapir frogs ), recorded their calls and performed DNA analysis on these amphibians to help confirm that they were a new species.
“Frogs of this genus ( Synapturanus ) are distributed throughout the Amazon, but since they live underground and cannot get very far by burrowing, the ranges in which each species is distributed are quite small. Given that we found this new species in Amazonian peat bogs, it would not be surprising if it were restricted to this environment”, explain the researchers who publish their finding in the journal Evolutionary Systematics.
This species belongs to a group that evolved in the prehistoric wetlands of the Western Amazon. Due to their burrowing behavior, these frogs most likely play a crucial role in nutrient cycling and changing soil structure. It’s clear that this tapir frog is further evidence of why scientists and local people must work together to protect this region, experts say.
A team of Peruvian herpetologists recently identified another group of frogs in other parts of the Putumayo basin that could be of the same species. If confirmed, it could provide scientists with more information about the species’ distribution and how best to conserve it. The next step will be to determine if this new frog species is restricted to peat bogs.
“I think the chances are high that this frog is a wetland specialist, but further research is needed to confirm it,” say the authors.
Referencia: Germán Chávez et al. “A needle in a haystack: Integrative taxonomy reveals the existence of a new small species of fossorial frog (Anura, Microhylidae, Synapturanus) from the vast lower Putumayo basin, Peru” Evolutionary Systematics
