Long snoot, small squeak.
Most disc frogs have a bulky body and broad snout that helps with burrowing into the soil, while the tapir frog has a more slender frame. “The danta frog is not prepared to dig very hard because the body shape is not robust enough,” Chávez says. However, its body is perfectly suited to the soggy and loose soil of the peatlands in which it dwells. In this type of wetland, thecause partially-decayed plant matter called peat to accumulate.
A team of Peruvian herpetologists has recently identified another group of frogs elsewhere in the Putumayo basin that may turn out to be the same species, he says. If this population can be confirmed as tapir frogs, they could give scientists more information about the species’s distribution and how best to conserve it.
The Putumayo is the only remaining Amazon tributary with no existing or proposed dams, the researchers noted in the paper. Currently, the area where the species was discovered has not been heavily affected much by habitat destruction. However, the amphibians could help researchers understand how this wetland ecosystem is responding to deforestation or climate change in the future.The next step, Chávez says, will be to determine whether the tapir frog is restricted to the peatlands.
The variety of approaches the researchers used, which included anatomical observations, genetic data, and audio recordings, strengthens their conclusion that the tapir frog is a new species, says Anne Chambers, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the research.
“In terms of this region, we know that there’s a lot of undescribed species and undescribed diversity in that part of the world,” she says. “It’s important for us to try to efficiently describe these species in a scientific and reliable way.”
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