Undergraduate student Chris Smaga published his first paper today, and it is a new snake genus! The name of the new genus Arcanumophis refers to the enigmatic nature of this small snake. Arcanumophis problematicus had previously been allocated to the genus Erythrolmaprus. Charles W Myers described the species in 1986 with the single known specimen from  the Field Museum, which had been collected in 1950 by Hilda Hempl Heller near San Juan del Oro. No other specimen of this snake was known until our rediscovery in 2016! The article is in collaboration with Alex Ttito (see full cite below). 

We rediscovered the species during a trip to the abandoned "Inca" mine of Santo Domingo, in the buffer zone of Bahuaja-Sonene National Park (Puno, Peru). This gold mine was very active at the beginning of the XX century, as seen in the photographic collection by Bruce Graham. The mine owners opened a trail through the Limbani Valley, crossing the Inambari river and ascending to Santo Domingo. Although there is little left of the mine, the trail is still in good conditions.

Santo Domingo is an important site for herpetological taxonomy because it is the type locality of several species, including species that are the type species of genera (e.g., Noblella peruviana). The main goal of our trip was to examine these type populations, documenting variations in morphology, coloration, etc., that could be useful for comparison with similar species from other valleys in southern Peru and in Bolivia. We were searching the leaf litter when we found the A. problematicus under mosses, very close to the original main camp site of the mine (see below). 

A possible autoapomorphy for the new genus is the presence of a crease on the rostral scale (see photo of our specimen left). In his original description, Myers noticed this crease, but because the holotype was not perfectly preserved, he could not determine whether the crease was an artifact of preservation. The presence of such rostral modification suggests the snake might be semi-fossorial or at least ground dwelling. Our finding the snake in the leaf litter, under layer of mosses, is consistent with the idea that A. problematicus is a ground dwelling snake. But who knows? We will need more than two observations to learn about its natural history.

​Smaga, C., A. Ttito, A. Catenazzi. 2019. Arcanumophis, a new genus and generic allocation for Erythrolamprus problematicus (Myers 1986), Xenodontinae (Colubridae) from the Cordillera de Carabaya, southern Peru. Zootaxa 4671: 129-138. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4671.1.10

Along with our collaborators Roy Santa Cruz and Evaristo López Tejeda from the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa, and Rudolf von May, Courtney Whitcher and Daniel Rabosky the University of Michigan, we describe a new species of minute leaf-litter frog, Noblella losamigos.

The description appeared today in a special issue of the journal Diversity. The new species has a snout-vent length of 9.0-13.6 mm (females are larger than males) and is distributed along a wide elevational range, from 200 to nearly 1500 m asl. Among species of Noblella, it is the only species with a distribution in both lowland Amazon and montane forests of the Amazonian Andes. Specifically, the new species is known to occur at the Los Amigos Biological Station, operated by Conservacion Amazonica, and at the Cock of the Rock Biological Station, owned and operated by Peru Verde. It has also been found at intermediate elevations in other locations. 

Similarly to the other species in the genus Noblella, the new species is among the smallest anurans. Small size is a common trait of many leaf-litter frogs, as seen in other species of frogs in the same family (i.e., Bryophryne, Psychrophrynella, etc.), as well as species in other families, such as the tiny Brachycephalus of the Mata Atlantica, or the three species of Mini (Mini ature, Mini mum, and Mini scule) from Madagascar, suggesting similar selective pressure may be driving convergent evolution to small size in the leaf litter environment.

A new collaboration published in Plos One and led by Dr. Rudolf von May documents variation in thermal traits for nearly 60 species of frogs in a diverse lowland Amazonian community. There is a growing interest in investigating the vulnerability of tropical organisms to climate warming, yet little information is available for most species. Lowland species are thought to be at risk because they live in environments that are already hot.

We found substantial variation in tolerance to heat among species. Some species, such as the Pristimantis ockendeni of the photo, are very sensitive to temperatures just above 30°C, whereas most treefrogs and all narrow mouthed frogs (Microhylidae) tolerate much warmer temperatures. In addition to the effects of phylogeny, we assessed the contribution of life history traits and found that both critical thermal maxima and minima were correlated with species’ body size and microhabitat use. We included examination of critical thermal minima because our study system in southern Peru is exposed to cold fronts, which cause temperatures in these lowland Amazon forests to go as low as 10°C. Our data suggest that thermal physiological traits in lowland frogs are evolutionarily labile and exhibit similar rates of thermal physiological change. 

The lab will be attending the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Snowbird, Utah from 24-28 July 2019. This meeting gathers researchers from three herpetological societies: the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, and the Herpetologist's League. These are the lab's presentations:

Friday, 26 July
8:45 - Ballroom 1
A. Shepack & A. Catenazzi (talk): Demography and viability of amphibian populations recovering from chytridiomycosis related declines

15:15 - Ballroom 2
S. Kupferberg, A. Catenazzi (talk): Between bedrock and a hard place: Riverine frogs navigate tradeoffs of pool permanency with disease risk during drought

Saturday, 27 July
10:00 - Ballroom 3
M. Koo et al (poster): New updates on AmphibiaWeb: All amphibians, all the time​

Sunday, 28 July
10:30 - Ballroom 3
A. Catenazzi (talk): Status of frog communities ravaged by fungal disease 15 years after the epizootic

We have decided to extend the closing date of the special issue of the journal Diversity dedicated to the Systematics and Conservation of Neotropical Amphibians and Reptiles! the submission period is now closing on 31 July. 

The purpose of this special issue is to gather original studies focusing on herpetological systematics and conservation. We welcome contributions focusing on any Neotropical group of amphibians and/or reptiles, and which use original data or modeling of available data, aimed at improving the use of systematic and taxonomic knowledge for conservation. We also encourage papers proposing new methods to accelerate taxonomic studies, including those that present technological advances to quickly generate molecular data. This special issue will be open to all facets of conservation, ranging from applied conservation (i.e., to improve captive breeding programs, help design protected areas, or to design education projects) to policymaking and assessments of species threat status. We especially encourage reports of successful conservation initiatives that rely on the use of newly generated taxonomic information.​ Learn more at https://bit.ly/2BfgRs3

We will be attending the meeting of the International Biogeography Society, and 2ndo Congreso Latinoamericano de Biogeografia, in Quito from 5-9 August 2019. Our lab will be contributing with two symposia talks, and by co-organizing a symposium. The two talks are:

Tuesday 6 August, Teatro Calderón de la Barca, 14:30
Stretched to the limits: field investigations to examine the predictive power of critical temperatures for understanding range shifts in amphibians (Architects of variation Symposium)

​Wednesday 7 August, Teatro Calderón de la Barca, 17:00
Phantom of epidemic (recent) past determines the elevational distribution of montane tropical frogs (Zoological elevation gradient Symposium)

The lab will be attending the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in Snowbird, Utah from 24-28 July 2019. This meeting gathers researchers from three herpetological societies: the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, and the Herpetologist's League. These are the lab's presentations:

A. Shepack & A. Catenazzi (talk): Demography and viability of amphibian populations recovering from chytridiomycosis related declines

A. Catenazzi (talk): Status of frog communities ravaged by fungal disease 15 years after the epizootic

S. Kupferberg, A. Catenazzi (talk): Between bedrock and a hard place: Riverine frogs navigate tradeoffs of pool permanency with disease risk during drought

Andrew Rubio defended his Master thesis "Effects of the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis on the trophic ecology of tadpoles of Andean water frogs" at SIU Carbondale. His thesis examined the effects of chytrid infection on the diet of tadpoles at Reserva Nacional Pampas Galeras in southern Peru. Chytrid infection degrades the mouthparts of tadpoles, thus changing their diet. Andrew will join the lab of Kyle Summers at ECU next August to continue with a PhD. Congrats Andrew! 

Meet the newest addition to the somewhat neglected, but full of hidden beauties Holoadeninae, part of the spectacular Terrarana group of terrestrial-breeding frogs: Noblella thuini. This micro-frog, less than 12 mm long (less than half an inch) lives in remnant cloud forests of the Ollachea Valley, in the southern Peruvian Department of Puno. Our lab publication describing the new species is published today in peerJ. We discovered this tiny frog with collaborator Alex Ttito during rapid surveys in the leaf litter of cloud forests of the Cordillera de Carabaya. This mountain range appears to support a large diversity of Holoadeninae genera, since four genera have now been confirmed to occur south of Ollachea. In addition to Noblella, these genera are Bryophryne, Microkayla and Psychrophrynella. Because most of these cloud forests have not been surveyed in detail, and due to the high beta diversity in these genera of high-elevation frogs, it is very likely that several more species remain to be discovered in this region. 

Lab member and undergraduate researcher Quinn Simpson presented a poster of his research during the 2019 Conference for Undergraduate Research at FIU (http://honors.fiu.edu/curfiu-2019/) on April 10. His research uses quantitative PCR assays to identify cryptic species of frogs. In addition to being morphologically nearly identical, these frogs are very closely related phylogenetically, which made development of the molecular assay challenging. Once developed, the assay allowed rapid screening of nearly 1500 already available DNA extracts of sampled frogs to confirm or update species identifications made in the field. Congrats Quinn!