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“This is a high-pitched call. Eezhee zhee zhee zhee … it’s actually faster than that.”
That’s Arthur White, an Australian frog biologist, imitating a species he discovered. You want to find a new species of frog? You’ll probably have to get your feet wet! Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside.
“I do a lot of field work and often I come across animals that I’m not too sure of what they are. So I’ll pull out my field guide and flick through it and look at all the pictures to try and work out what species it is, and sometimes it’s just simply not there. In other words, it’s a species that hasn’t been previously picked up by science, and therefore it hasn’t been given a name, it hasn’t been described. Usually when that happens I have to bring the animal back and lodge it in one of the institutions, be it a museum or one of the teaching universities, with the relevant expert who would then formally identify the specimen, try and work out what identifying characteristics it has, how it’s different from other species. And then they would correctly assign it to the genus and the species. That species, I ended up describing it myself, and I called it Littlejohn’s Tree Frog.”
Arthur White discovered the Littlejohn’s Tree Frog in a forest near Sydney, Australia.
ambience: Littlejohn’s Tree Frog
“And this is really quite surprising because this is the most populated part of Australia, so you don’t normally expect to find new species here. It wasn’t a case that this species looked like another more common species; in fact it really couldn’t be misidentified or confused with known species. It was just simply a case that it was either bad luck that no one had come across it before, or it may also be that a lot of people are fair weather animal watchers and some of these animals really only come out under fairly diabolical conditions when the rain is belting down and the wind is blowing, and unfortunately that’s when this species seems to be most active.”
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