Alex was just awarded a Graduate Student Research in Herpetology grant from the Chicago Herpetological Society.  The proposal, “Back from the dead?: Rebounding amphibian populations with an enzootic pathogen,” will help fund his doctoral work in Central and South America on amphibian communities and chytrid.  

Stay tuned for updates from Alex's next trip to Costa Rica and Panama in March! 

It didn't take too long for our new Telmatobius to get noticed. Sarah Keartes at Earth Touch found Telmatobius ventriflavum strikingly similar to Martin from the Simpsons.  Not convinced? judge for yourself with more pictures of the new frog stored at Calphotos. 

A lab contribution published this week by the open-access biodiversity journal Zookeys names a new species of Telmatobius from the Andes. The new species has been named Telmatobius ventriflavum because of its unique coloration. The name comes from the Latin venter, meaning belly, and flavus, meaning yellow and  refers to the golden yellow and orange coloration on the body.


The Telmatobiinae, Andean water frogs, are a subfamily of frogs endemic to the Andes of South America. The populations of several species of Telmatobius have declined dramatically over the past 30 years, and the genus is now thought to be extinct in Ecuador. These declines have been associated with the spread of the fungal disease chytridiomycosis. The study detected the presence of the chytrid fungus, but the impact of chytridiomycosis on the new species is unknown. Future efforts should monitor disease prevalence to prevent outbreaks that might endanger the survival of this endemic species.

The article is available here: 10.3897/zookeys.480.8578  
Catenazzi A, Vargas García V, Lehr E (2015) A new species of Telmatobius (Amphibia, Anura, Telmatobiidae) from the Pacific slopes of the Andes, Peru. ZooKeys 480: 81-95.

The short video shows different moments of a typical frogging (and herping) day at Wayqecha. We leave Wayqecha by car and climb above the station and the cloud forest, in the high-Andean grassland (puna) at elevations from 3300 to 3450 m. The day started with a partially clouded sky and some sun, but that did not last very long, as you will see in the video. Most frogs in the puna live within the bunchgrass and under a layer of permanently wet mosses; however for a quick search we are just lifting rocks that had recently been exposed during installation of electric posts. Marsupial frogs particularly love to hide in rock crevices and other rocky substrates exposed by landslides and other disturbance. We are also deploying some temperature loggers in small copper pipes that simulate the thermal behavior of lizards. The local lizards (small gymnophthalmids) are intriguing in their general aversion to basking -- even under ideal circumstances they keep their body temperature around 20C, which is quite low for a lizard.