Image courtesy of Alexander Tamanini Mônico
Joel Kontinen
Can a tiny frog that has golden joints included in the Lazarus-animals scientists have found? Some frogs are tiny and yet they are still frog and they have not changed into something else, as evolution insists.
Resplendent with its blue stripes and golden legs,
this newly described poison dart frog may look imposing, but it is only about
the size of a thumbnail, measuring just 14 to 17 millimetres from the tip of
its snout to its derrière, or cloaca.
Esteban Koch at
the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, and his
colleagues found the frog in the forests of the Juruá river basin in Brazil in
2023 and went back to look for further specimens in 2024. The team has now
officially described it and named the species Ranitomeya aetherea.
Little is known about the frog, but there are clues
about its parental care system. Koch’s team hasn’t found any large groups of
tadpoles, hatched from a big clutch of eggs. Instead, they have spotted only
individuals, mainly in water-filled cavities where leaves join the stem on
palm-like plants called Phenakospermum guyannense.
The team saw one female deposit a single egg, which suggests
that eggs are laid singly, as happens in some other poison dart frogs. “It’s
possible that the female goes back when the tadpole is developing and lays
another unfertilised egg, so that the tadpole can eat this to get energy,” says
Koch.
The researchers don’t know how big the population of
the frogs is, so can’t tell if it is endangered, but in the year between the
two surveys, they saw there had been deforestation in the area they
searched, which they accessed via a small plane and then an 8-hour boat trip on
the river. “As the frog is really specific to this plant in this area, any
small disturbance could be dangerous to the species,” says Koch.
Source:
Chris Simms 2025
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