Frog with tapir-like nose found in Amazon rainforest, thanks to its
'beeping' call

Date:
February 22, 2022
Source:
Field Museum
Summary:
A tiny burrowing frog that lives underground in the Amazon,
known to local people as the 'tapir frog' because its long nose,
has been given an official scientific description.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
The people of Peru's Comunidad Nativa Tres Esquinas have long known
about a tiny, burrowing frog with a long snout; one local name for it
is rana danta, "tapir frog" for its resemblance to the large-nosed
Amazonian mammal. But until now, this frog has remained elusive to
biologists. Thanks to the help of local guides, an international team of researchers was able to find the frog and give it an official scientific
name and description.


========================================================================== "These frogs are really hard to find, and that leads to them being understudied," says Michelle Thompson, a researcher in the Keller Science Action Center at Chicago's Field Museum and one of the authors of a
study describing the frog in Evolutionary Systematics. "It's an example
of the Amazon's hidden diversity, and it's important to document it to understand how important the ecosystem functions." "Frogs of this genus
are spread throughout the Amazon, but since they live underground and
can't get very far by digging, the ranges each species is distributed
in are fairly small. Since we found this new species in Amazon peatland,
it wouldn't be strange for it to be restricted to this environment.

Its body shape and general look seems to be adapted to the soft soil of
the peatland, rather than the robust and wider shape of species in other environments,"says Germa'n Cha'vez, a researcher at Peru's Instituto
Peruano de Herpetologi'a and the study's first author.

The tapir frog's appearance is striking. "It looks like a caricature of
a tapir, because it has a big blobby body with this tiny little pointy
head," says Thompson. But despite its goofy appearance, it was very
difficult to find.

"The frogs are tiny, about the size of a quarter, they're like brown,
they're underground, and they're quick," she says. "You know these
little frogs are somewhere underground, but you just don't see them
hopping around." But while the frogs are hard to see, they're not hard to hear. "We just kept hearing this beep-beep-beepcoming from underground,
and we suspected it could be a new species of burrowing frog because
there had recently been other species in its genus described," says
Thompson. "But how do we get to it?" Local guides who were familiar with
the frogs led the researchers to peatland areas -- wetlands carpeted with nutrient-rich turf made of decaying plant matter. The team searched by
night, when the frogs were most active.



==========================================================================
"We had already caught a juvenile our first night in the peatlands,
but at 2- 3am, we were tired. So, we chose our last night in that site,
after three hard nights searching for frogs and snakes, to go to the
peatlands exclusively to find those frogs that we heard the first night," recalls Cha'vez. "David Sa'nchez, one of our coauthors from the Instituto Amazo'nico de Investigaciones Cienti'ficas in Colombia, suggested that
once we heard one of these lads calling, we create an imaginary square,
perhaps one meter by one meter, and started to dig with our hands in
this square to find them." "We could hear them underground, going beep-beep-beep, and we'd stop, turn off our lights, and dig around,
and then listen for it again," says Thompson.

"After a few hours, one hopped out of his little burrow, and we were
screaming, 'Somebody grab it!'" "After 15 to 20 minutes of digging and
looking for them, I heard Michelle screaming, and to me that could only
mean that she and David had found the first adult," says Chavez.

In addition to finally finding adult specimens of the frogs, the team
recorded their calls. "I am obsessed with recording frog calls, so I
decided to record the call first and then continue digging," says Cha'vez.

The researchers used the physical specimens of the frogs, along with
the recordings of their calls and an analysis of the frogs' DNA, to
confirm that they were a new species. They named them Synapturanus danta
-- Synapturanus is the name of the genus they belong to, and danta is
Spanish for "tapir." "Our genetic analyses show this new species belongs
to a group that evolved in the western Amazon, where the influence of prehistoric landscapes like the Pebas Lake might have created different wetlands, which originated the diversity we see in Synapturanus today,"
says Cha'vez.



==========================================================================
The frogs' burrowing behavior that made them hard to find likely makes
them an important part of their peatland home. "They're part of the
underground ecosystem," says Thompson. "They're moving down there,
they're eating down there, they're laying their eggs down there. They contribute to nutrient cycling and changing the soil structure."
"Beside the important role of this new species in the food chain of its habitat, we believe that it could be an indicator of healthy peatlands,"
says Cha'vez. "First, we have to confirm whether it's restricted to this habitat, but its body adaptations seem to point in that direction. For instance, if the habitat is too dry, the soil would become too hard for
a non-robust frog like this one to dig. This would leave our frog with
far fewer chances to find a shelter and eventually, it would be hunted
by a bigger predator. So I think possibilities that this frog would be
a wetlands specialist are high, but still need to go further in this
research to confirm it." And the study's implications go beyond the description of one little frog. S.

danta was found during a rapid inventory led by Field Museum scientists,
a program in which biologists and social scientists spend a few weeks in
a patch of the Amazon to learn what species live there, how the people in
the area manage the land, and how they can help make a case for the area
to be protected. "Even though it's called a rapid inventory, it could take
a year or more to plan these things, and then it could take a year or a
decade to do the conservation follow-up," says Thompson. "The rapid part
is where you spend a month in the field. And it's a total whirlwind."
Rapid inventories rely upon local expertise, both of scientists and of
the people who live on the land. "The most special thing about rapid inventories is the group of people you're with," says Thompson. "There
are people sharing their traditional knowledge about the land that they're from, people from universities, museums, governments. Bringing all these
people with different background together is probably the best space to
learn in." Peru's Putumayo Basin, where this rapid inventory took place,
is part of a larger conservation scheme by the Keller Science Action
Center and its partners. "The Putumayo Corridor spans from Ecuador,
Colombia, Peru, and down to Brazil, following the Putumayo River," says Thompson. "There's very little deforestation, and it's also one of the
last free flowing rivers that has no current dams. There's like a huge conservation opportunity to conserve the whole corridor, watershed and surrounding areas. This tapir frog is another piece of evidence of why scientists and local people need to work together to protect this region." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Field_Museum. Note: Content may be
edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
* The_tiny_frog ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Germa'n Cha'vez, Michelle E. Thompson, David A. Sa'nchez, Juan
Carlos
Cha'vez-Arribasplata, Alessandro Catenazzi. 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,
2022; 6 (1): 9 DOI: 10.3897/evolsyst.6.80281 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220222135153.htm

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