This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Science can't study a species—or unlock its potential to change the world—until people actually know it exists. Four new species of frogs have now been given names, thanks to the efforts of FIU biologist Alessandro Catenazzi.
The researcher in the FIU Institute of Environment and his collaborators used morphological, acoustic and genetic evidence to describe four new species of Oreobates frogs collected near the Cordillera Azul National Park in Peru, raising the known number of species of these small, ground-dwelling frogs from 27 to 31. The research was published recently in the journal Diversity. Catenazzi, a veteran biologist who has contributed to the description of more than 55 frog species throughout his career, says the importance of naming a species goes far beyond adding another entry into a scientific catalog.
"Each species is its own world," said Catenazzi. "We derive a lot from nature—even drugs, even food. I can't tell you specifically what the value of these four species is yet, but there could be a cure for cancer there … And the first step of anything you want to do in biology is to name the organism." Giving a frog a name may sound simple, but establishing that it is actually a new species is far from it.
For Catenazzi and his collaborators, that process involves comparing physical traits, calls and ultimately genetic evidence. "You can be very knowledgeable about what you see in the forest, but you also have to know what people have already described. And that's not trivial, because a lot of those species were described in the 19th or 20th century.
The types are often at the British Museum, or in some European museum, or in New York or at the Smithsonian. It can be challenging, because just to have seen the types means going to all those places and actually handling them." But checking museum specimens only answers whether a frog has already been morphologically described. Biologists like Catenazzi still needed to determine whether the four specimens collected were distinct from their closest relatives.
"We still look at morphological traits that will differentiate them—this one is black, this one is brown, this one has a little tubercle, this one has smooth skin, and so on," he said. "But in addition to that, we also look at the [mating] calls. We record the calls and we characterize them, we contrast them.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
