Tiny new tree frog species found in rewilded Costa Rican nature reserve
by Liz Kimbrough on 9 September 2022
Nestled in a valley between two volcanoes, Donald Varela-Soto heard something unfamiliar. For six months, he searched for the source of a shrill frog call along the edge of a wetland in Tapir Valley Nature Reserve, a former cattle ranch in northern Costa Rica.
“I kept hearing this different sound in the wetland but was unable to find it,” Varela-Soto, co-owner of the private reserve, told Mongabay. “Then, on a particularly rainy day, the water rose in the wetland, pushing the frogs out to the edges, and that’s when I saw it in person. It was like, wow, this is amazing! This is beautiful!”
The tapir valley tree frog (Tlalocohyla celeste) is only around 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) long, about the size of a bottle cap. Photo by Marco Molina.
Valeria Aspinall and Varela-Soto and watching a Tapir Valley tree frog in the wetland at Tapir Valley Nature Reserve, its only known habitat. Photo by David Vela Muñoz.
The brilliant-green frog, as it happens, is new to science. It’s minuscule, about the size of a bottle cap, and has a distinctive yellow line that runs halfway around its bright body. Soto and colleagues named it the Tapir Valley tree frog, with the scientific name of Tlalocohyla celeste in honor of the turquoise waters of a local river, the Río Celeste. A formal description of the species has now been published in the journal Zootaxa.
After Varela-Soto found the first male frog on that rainy day in 2018, Valeria Aspinall, a biologist and one of the study’s co-authors, found a female frog and observed frogs in amplexus (mating) and then laying eggs. The research team, which included Aspinall, co-author and herpetologist Juan Abarca, and sometimes Varela-Soto’s two young daughters (both under the age of 10 at the time), collected eggs and observed their metamorphoses into tadpoles and mature frogs. These observations and DNA analyses confirmed that the species is indeed new to science.
More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/tiny-new-tree-frog-species-found-in-rewilded-costa-rican-nature-reserve/
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