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20 New Species Of Brown Frog Found In Madagascar Proves It Is Still The Hot Spot

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Taxonomists are racing against time to find and record new species before they become extinct in order to preserve the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Major advances are required to complete the biological inventory on Earth.

A big multinational team has now made significant progress in the taxonomy of Madagascar’s frogs, identifying 20 new species all at once.

The work was published in the journal Megataxa as open access.

The frogs belong to the subgenus Brygoomantis of the genus Mantidactylus, which formerly had just 14 species.

These unnoticeable brown, little frogs are common near streams in the humid jungles of Madagascar. To entice females, the males make extremely delicate marketing sounds.

“The calls typically sound like a creaking door, or a gurgling stomach’ adds lead author, Dr Mark D. Scherz. 

“Finding, recording, and catching calling individuals of these frogs is a real challenge, but has proven critically important for the discovery and description of these many new species. That means a lot of time on hands and knees in the mud.”

The team has been working for a long time to get to this point.

According to Dr. Frank Glaw, Curator of Herpetology at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München in Munich, Germany, “this is the culmination of intensive fieldwork across Madagascar over more than 30 years. Our dataset contains genetic data from over 1300 frogs, and measurements of several hundred specimens.”

The use of cutting-edge ‘museomics,’ in which DNA is sequenced from ancient museum material, was a major weapon in the authors’ arsenal. Because DNA deteriorates with time and as a result of the numerous chemicals employed to preserve animal specimens, this is often a challenging task.

However, using a technique known as ‘DNA Barcode Fishing,’ the team was able to get usable DNA sequences from the majority of the relevant museum material. Professor Miguel Vences of the Technische Universität Braunschweig, the senior author, says that “Museomics gave definitive identifications of sometimes very ambiguous-looking specimens. This gives us a level of confidence in our species descriptions that were not previously possible based on morphology alone.”

Even with this significant advancement, the subgenus Brygoomantis doesn’t appear to have reached its conclusion.

“There are still several Brygoomantis lineages that are probably separate species, but that we didn’t have enough data or material for,” adds Dr Andolalao Rakotoarison, co-chair of the Amphibian Specialist Group for Madagascar, “Even for those species for which we have names, we know almost nothing about their biology or ecology. We need a lot more field research on these frogs, and more specimens in museum collections, to really gain a good understanding of them.”

Source:10.11646/megataxa.7.2.1

Image Credit: Getty

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