100 Under 100 by Scott Leslie

Author:Scott Leslie [Leslie, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4434-0429-7
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

ARMOURED MISTFROG

Happy stories don’t crop up very often in the sobering realm of endangered species. The news reports about threatened animals and plants are almost always dire and typically elicit a “here we go again” response. We’ve pretty much come to expect bad news. That’s why the story of a little frog that lives in the rushing torrents of an Australian rainforest stream is so unusual.

First discovered in 1976, the armoured mistfrog is named for the male’s spiny skin and its penchant for hanging out on spray-soaked boulders beside waterfalls, a specialized habitat known as the splash zone. At night, the little brown and grey mottled frogs, just over three and a half centimetres long, gather along the creek to enjoy the spray—and presumably sing a song that nobody’s yet heard. During the day, they take refuge in deep cracks in the rocks around the cascade. Little is known about the frog’s ecology, since it has been observed only a few times. However, based on the habits of a separate but very similar species known as the waterfall frog, it’s thought the armoured mistfrog lays eggs under stream-bottom rocks and its offspring spend the tadpole stage living in the torrent.

Armoured mistfrogs are one of a group of amphibians (“amphibian” comes from the Greek amphi, meaning “two,” and bios, “life”—in reference to their dual aquatic and terrestrial lives) known as torrent frogs. In Australia, they are found in northeastern Queensland—if you imagine that country’s shape as resembling the head of a Scottie dog facing west, the area we’re talking about is along the eastern edge of its northern pointy ear. Torrent frogs are adapted to breeding in and living beside tumbling creeks draining the highland rainforests of the region, known as the wet tropics. Several torrent frog species have suffered dramatic population crashes since the 1980s and 1990s, possibly due to chytrid fungus, the deadly pathogen that has ravaged frog populations around the world. The armoured mistfrog was found in an area of less than 130 square kilometres at high elevations in Cape Tribulation and Daintree National Parks. Note the past tense of the preceding statement. That’s because after December 1991 the armoured mistfrog was never again seen in its known range. Experts thought it was extinct.

Fast-forward 17 years to July 2008. A doctoral student was searching for another species of torrent frog in an area more than 100 kilometres south of Daintree National Park. He happened to stumble upon what appeared to be several armoured mistfrogs in a stream. Rediscovering a long-lost species isn’t an everyday occurrence, so tissue samples were sent to the Australian National University in Canberra to verify their identity. DNA analysis confirmed they were armoured mistfrogs.

Further investigations have revealed a tiny population of only 30 to 40 of the frogs at the site, where it lives side by side with the closely related waterfall mistfrog. Both species are infected with the same chytrid fungus that was thought to be the culprit for the armoured mistfrog’s disappearance from its original range to the north.

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