There is so much more to flying frogs than flying frogs
There is so much more to flying frogs than flying frogs
By Darren Naish | January 11, 2015
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Beautiful painting of Wallace's flying frog (Rhacophorus
nigropalmatus) by the unique Carel Brest van Kampen.
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Episode 2 of David Attenborough’s Conquest of the Skies appeared on TV the other day, and I watched it (in fact, I livetweeted throughout, mostly because I wanted to talk about their portrayal of pterosaurs and Mesozoic theropods). And hence I have rhacophorid frogs on my mind – the mostly tropical Afro-Asian frog group that includes the famous Rhacophorus flying frogs, the best known member of which is Wallace’s flying frog R. nigropalmatus from Indonesia, Thailand and adjacent countries (adjacent painting by Carel Brest van Kampen; used with permission). As usual, flying frogs (along with colugos) were used by Sir David to help illustrate the diversity of animals that have evolved a gliding ability.
Rhacophorids are sometimes called flying frogs, shrub frogs, bush frogs, moss frogs, Old World treefrogs, or Afro-Asian treefrogs, and occur across sub-Saharan Africa, China, much of tropical Asia, Japan, the Philippines and Sulawesi. About 380 species are recognised as of early 2015. The last time I wrote about this group – December 2008 – this number was more like 290, so the rate at which new species are discovered and named is pretty impressive.
A nice illustration of this is provided by Meegaskumbura et al.’s (2002) documentation of more than 100 new rhacophorid species on Sri Lanka alone (just 18 Sri Lankan rhacophorid species were known prior to their work), a discovery that makes Sri Lanka on par with Madagascar, New Guinea and Borneo in terms of anuran diversity.
And, yes, more than 100 new species announced in a single paper. If we look at the discovery record of various of the rhacophorid lineages, we see that – for example – 43 new species of Raorchestes, 30 new species of Rhacophorus, and 51 new species of Pseudophilautus have been named since 2000… 9 new Raorchestes species were named in 2014 alone (Frost 2014). As should be well known, the number of recognised amphibian species has sky-rocketed in recent years, and this really is because of newly discovered species, not just the result of splitting, taxonomic elevation of subspecies, or the recognition of cryptic species that can only be distinguished genetically.
More:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2015/01/11/rhacophorids-more-than-flying-frogs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tetrapod-zoology%2Ffeed+%28Blog%3A+Tetrapod+Zoology%29
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Flying Reptiles & Frogs [/center]
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