Science

the frog news is hopping today

When a new species is discovered, it's tempting to imagine an adventure novel, said Chan Kin Onn of Michigan State University. "Most people have this image of an intrepid explorer braving an isolated mountain or some other remote place, and stumbling across a creature that no one has ever seen before," Chan said. Sure, that still happens occasionally. "But most of the time it's far less glamorous," he added.

Instead, the vast majority of new vertebrate species are "discovered" by revisiting known populations with new data or tools, and showing they were more distinct than previously thought.

Chan is a herpetologist, a scientist who specializes in studying amphibians and reptiles like frogs, turtles, lizards, and snakes. There are more than 9,000 species of amphibians on the planet, and each year roughly 100 to 200 are added to the list, he said.

Take a group of little brown frogs from Southeast Asia called the Bornean fanged frogs, so called because of tooth-like projections on their jaws. One of them, Limnonectes kuhlii, has been known to science since 1838. But in the last two decades, genetic analyses have found that what looks like one species might actually be as many as 18.

"Animals that look similar but are genetically distinct are called cryptic species," said Chan, who is also Curator of Vertebrate Collections and a core faculty member in MSU's Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program.

Due to advances in genetic sequencing, "a ton of cryptic species are being discovered left and right."

To see if, in fact, these frogs had been woefully undercounted, Chan and colleagues extracted DNA from specimens collected across the mountain rainforests of Malaysian Borneo and analyzed more than 13,000 genes across their genomes.

According to their work, published Jan. 14 in the journal Systematic Biology, the frogs do indeed fall into multiple genetic clusters. But only six or seven clusters could be classified as distinct species.

"It's not just one species. But it's not 18 species, either," Chan said.

The question is more than an academic hairsplitting exercise.

That's because the world's frogs are in trouble. A 2023 study of some 8,000 amphibian species worldwide revealed that two out of five amphibian species are threatened with extinction, making them the most endangered group of vertebrates on the planet.

On the one hand, if we don't know a species exists, we can't protect it, said Chan, who was a co-author on the 2023 study.

"There are so many species in the world that we still haven't discovered, and that could go extinct before we can give them a name," Chan said.

"But there's a flip side to that coin too," he added.

Overzealously splitting what was once considered one species into multiples can create problems for conservation biologists, making the geographic range of newly described cryptic species seem more restricted—and their situation more dire—than it really is.

"We cannot possibly conserve everything, so we have to triage and decide how to allocate limited resources toward what we think are the highest priorities," Chan said. "We could be putting names on things that shouldn't be prioritized."

The researchers also found a lot of interbreeding between these different frogs.

"We found a ton of gene flow going on," Chan said.

All the DNA moving back and forth can make for blurry dividing lines. As a result, some of the growing number of cryptic species may be more methodological artifact than biological reality, he added.

The fanged frogs in Borneo show that species don't evolve instantaneously. "It's not like all of a sudden, boom. It's more of a continuum," Chan said.

Fanged frogs are by no means the only group of animals whose numbers scientists may have miscalculated.

Over the past two decades, genetic studies of animals ranging from insects and fish to birds and mammals suggest there may be a staggering number of species hiding in plain sight.

Where once the total number of species on Earth was thought to be 8.7 million, more recent models accounting for cryptic species suggest the true number may be anywhere from 7 to 250 times that.

So where does the true number lie? "This study shows that there's a speciation 'gray zone' that can make it hard to draw the line," Chan said.

ⓘ This user is suspected of really liking frogs. Send newts (or something like that).

Smithsonian researchers in Panama have begun to reintroduce native golden frogs to the wild in special enclosures

The last known time that someone saw bright yellow frogs bespeckled with black dots in Panama’s wilderness was in 2009. These Panamanian golden frogs probably succumbed to a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which has decimated amphibian populations across the globe.

Now, researchers who have captive-bred the critically endangered golden frogs recently soft-released 100 of them into nature. The creatures stayed in special pens in late 2025 so that the scientists could assess how the deadly disease affects the animals—and how they might eventually adapt to it.

“This project was designed to see what would happen if we put these golden frogs back into a wild situation, just to kind of understand what are the disease dynamics, and how do these frogs regain their skin toxins,” Brian Gratwicke, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI), tells Smithsonian magazine.

Chytridiomycosis is an infectious disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, also called chytrid fungus. It’s thought to have reached southern Central America—where Panama is located—in the late 1980s. In 2019, researchers estimated that Bd had led to the extinction of 90 species worldwide as well as the decline of at least 491 others, and chytridiomycosis is often considered the most devastating wildlife disease on record.

Fungal spores can travel in water and even catch rides with other animals, including humans. Once they reach an amphibian, chytrid fungus can have devastating effects.

“It attacks the skin and kind of forms the ability to grow in and on the skin, and then causes, usually, the skin to fall off of the animal,” Jason Stajich, a microbiologist at the University of California, Riverside, who is not involved in the Panama project, tells Smithsonian magazine. “Because amphibians breathe through their skin, that can really impair them.”

Fun facts: Deceptive, deadly frog

• Despite their name, Panamanian golden frogs are actually toads.
• Research suggests that each frog has enough toxins in its skin to kill more than 1,000 mice.

Around two decades ago, experts at NZCBI and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute predicted the decline of golden frogs and other creatures in Panama based on how Bd was spreading. So, they partnered with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and Zoo New England to build the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project (PARC) to protect animals at the highest risk of extinction from the fungal disease.

Gratwicke and his colleagues at PARC have been captive-breeding these amphibians for about 20 years. Now, the team has begun to release them back into nature to understand how to rewild these threatened species. In August 2025, the researchers put golden frogs in pens called mesocosms, which Gratwicke likens to outdoor patios.

“We put a big layer of leaf litter on the bottom that’s full of little insects and food so the frogs can forage,” he says. “It keeps the frogs inside where we can find them again, and it also keeps some of the predators out.”

The frogs spent 12 weeks inside these mesocosms, while researchers kept tabs on the creatures. During that time, about 70 percent of the frogs died from chytridiomycosis. Most of the surviving frogs were fully released into the wild afterwards.

Although the death rate was high, the data collected during this trial period is crucial to understanding how chytridiomycosis spreads and persists, and how amphibians might be able to adapt to chytrid fungus, Gratwicke says. “This experiment is probably the first experiment where we’ve actually been able to really get a full understanding of the disease dynamics of these animals.”

This might help researchers eventually place golden frogs in environments that are at adequate temperatures for the animals but too hot for the fungus. In recent research, for example, individuals of a frog species that lives in southeastern Australia seemed to have an easier time fending off chytrid fungus if they spent time in warm, sunny “saunas” than those in cooler temperatures.

And in some regions, amphibians whose numbers declined due to chytrid are beginning to bounce back. Tom Smith, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has seen this happen with certain frogs in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. “These populations have now been living with that pathogen for several generations across several decades, and we’re actually seeing adaptation and evolution to that in some of the populations,” he tells Smithsonian magazine.

Additionally, some frog species in the region do not seem to be susceptible to chytrid fungus, and scientists hope to use those species to “discover what the mechanism of tolerance and or resistance is to the disease,” says Smith, who is not involved in the Panama project.

For now, the team at PARC will continue to keep an eye on the Panamanian golden frogs to better understand fungal resilience in the creatures.

“I’ve been very pleased with the progress,” Gratwicke says. “It’s really important to actually make progress towards our ultimate goal, which is to create healthy, thriving populations of these animals to the wild. This experiment is one of the first steps towards achieving that.”

One of the links had another great photo of one:

Art by Dani Navarro, support human-made, scientifically accurate paleoart

https://nitter.net/playerDNG

Layperson article

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260222092251.htm

Primary source (paywalled)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5486

Excerpts from primary article

Editor’s summary Recent descriptions of and debates about the massive, fish-eating dinosaur Spinosaurus have brought this striking predator to the forefront of the dinosaur pantheon. Its huge size and distinctive morphology have stimulated much debate about the degree to which it lived an aquatic lifestyle. Sereno et al. describe a crested fossil Spinosaurus found in northern Africa as a new species. The researchers argue that this group of dinosaurs underwent three phases of evolution with increasing aquatic adaptations and existence in habitats around the Tethys Sea. —Sacha Vignieri

INTRODUCTION The fossils of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a giant sail-backed, fish-eating theropod dinosaur from northern Africa, have inspired competing lifestyle interpretations, either as a semiaquatic ambush predator stalking shorelines and shallows or a fully aquatic predator in pursuit of prey underwater. Its bones and teeth have been found only in coastal deposits near marine margins, a locale potentially consistent with either lifestyle interpretation.

RATIONALE In the central Sahara, a new fossiliferous area (Jenguebi) was discovered in beds equivalent in age [Farak Formation; Cenomanian ~95 million years ago (Mya)] to those yielding fossil remains of S. aegyptiacus. We describe from this area a new species, Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov., which is very similar to S. aegyptiacus in skeletal form but with a much taller, scimitar-shaped cranial crest. Two new sauropods were found in close association with the new spinosaurid buried in fluvial sediments indicative of an inland riparian habitat.

RESULTS S. mirabilis sp. nov. is distinguished by the low profile of its snout, a hypertrophied nasal-prefrontal crest, greater spacing of posterior maxillary teeth, and other features. Its features highlight the extraordinary specializations of both species of the genus Spinosaurus, including interdigitating upper and lower teeth. Principal component analysis of body proportions places spinosaurids between semiaquatic waders (e.g., herons) and aquatic divers (e.g., darters) distant from all other predatory dinosaurs. A time-calibrated phylogenetic analysis resolves three evolutionary phases: an initial Jurassic radiation when their distinctive elongate fish-snaring skull evolved and split into two distinctive designs, baryonychine and spinosaurine; an Early Cretaceous circum-Tethyan diversification when both reigned as dominant predators; and a final early Late Cretaceous phase when spinosaurines attained maximum body size as shallow water ambush specialists limited geographically to northern Africa and South America.

CONCLUSION The discovery of the tall-crested S. mirabilis sp. nov. in a riparian setting within an inland basin supports a lifestyle interpretation of a wading, shoreline predator with visual display an important aspect of its biology. At the end of the Cenomanian about 95 million years ago, an abrupt eustatic rise in sea level and the attendant climate change brought the spinosaurid radiation to an end.

It was on the small side though.

A thousand white guys with degrees couldn't stand up to him. Uneducated brown guy. Discovered the formula for pi. Said math was the language of the gods. Spoke it like he was one. Best mathematician since euler. Died at 33 because they couldn't fucking accept being made the fool.

God bless the Indians.

We'd be shitting in buckets without them.

no launch on Monday

Apparently this is old news, but it’s the first I’m hearing it, and, well, frogs are pretty cool.

But:

The scientists then infected frogs

What’s your fucking problem, scientists? Find some sick frogs to cure instead of infecting healthy ones you sick fucks.

^Inside\ a\ “sauna,”\ heat\ helps\ frogs\ rid\ themselves\ of\ a\ deadly\ fungal\ infection^

Australia’s green and golden bell frog has suffered greatly from Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a fungus that has spread around the world over the past 3 decades. With its range reduced by 90%, the amphibian is teetering on the edge of extinction. Now, scientists have shown that small plastic-covered shelters can help the frogs warm up enough to kill the fungus, potentially rescuing the species—and maybe others—before it disappears.

“It’s a superinnovative and impressive paper,” says Brian Gratwicke, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute who was not involved with the work. “The implications are very hopeful.”

The approach, reported today in Nature, might improve the outlook for other frogs as well if the shelters could be distributed widely or put out in targeted efforts to help the last remaining populations of rare and endangered frogs, says Benedikt Schmidt, a conservation biologist at the University of Zurich, also not involved.

Bd wiped out the iconic harlequin frogs of Central America in the 1990s, causing the cloud forests to fall silent. Around the world, 90 species of frog have gone extinct, and even more have been pushed to the brink of vanishing, earning Bd the dubious distinction of the most harmful infectious disease of wildlife. The fungus spreads easily, often through the pet trade, infecting the skin of susceptible species and eventually causing heart attacks.

In the lab, antifungal medications can cure the disease. Keeping heat-loving frogs at 30°C also kills the fungus and can even assist some species in building immunity. But scientists have struggled to come up with practical ways to help animals survive the fungus in the wild. In a few heroic cases, scientists even temporarily removed the animals from remote ponds and disinfected the habitat.

Looking for a simpler approach, researchers have proposed putting small, heated enclosures into the field to allow frogs to warm themselves enough to kill the fungus. But no one had tested the idea.

Anthony Waddle, a conservation biologist at Macquarie University, wondered whether the approach might work with bell frogs. The animals like to climb into the holes of bricks, so Waddle designed a cheap, small greenhouse shelter that could surround these bricks and bring them up to 30°C. “I started to think, ‘What if the frogs can help themselves?’” he says. “Maybe all we have to do is give them an opportunity.”

First, Waddle and colleagues studied the bell frogs in the lab. They showed that when they infected animals with Bd, they preferred to be at 30°C. These frogs had milder disease than those kept at 19°C, which is an ideal temperature for the fungus. And frogs that could choose the temperature—by going in and out of various compartments in the housing—did even better, suggesting that being able to raise and lower body temperature is a particularly effective way for frogs to fight the fungus. The experiments also showed that, like some other species, bell frogs that had cleared an infection were better able to resist reinfection.

^The\ green\ and\ gold\ bell\ frog\ of\ Australia\ is\ an\ endangered\ species^

Moving outside, Waddle and colleagues created habitats in a dozen 3.5-meter-wide tubs. They added gravel, water, some artificial plants, and flowerpots for the frogs to hide in. Every tub also housed a shelter for the frogs consisting of a stack of black bricks, each with 10 frog-size holes. This shelter was enclosed in a small greenhouse, about the size of a lawn chair, wrapped in translucent plastic. The greenhouses heated up in the Sun and created a sauna effect inside. In a variation on this setup, the scientists also covered some of these greenhouses with shade cloth, which kept the temperatures inside cooler.

The scientists then infected frogs and put them in the tubs, observing them for several months and recapturing them every week or so to check for the severity of infection.

The sick frogs seemed to prefer spending time in the greenhouses rather than outside of them; they were seen there four times more often than would be expected by chance. The higher temperatures in the unshaded greenhouses helped them fight the infection, whereas the frogs in the slightly cooler shaded shelters had infections twice as intense. “I’m glad that we have a proof-of-concept study that show that the method could work for some species,” Schmidt says.

Waddle says he hopes the findings will lead to ways to help wild frogs. “I am extremely anxious about the outlook for the species.” He has a small grant to install frog shelters in Sydney Olympic Park, which has one of the largest remaining populations of the green and golden bell frogs. So far, he's put up 50, and he will track how the frogs do over the next few years. He also hopes to look at five to six other frog species in Australia that may benefit from the shelters, because they can tolerate temperatures high enough to kill Bd.

The approach could work for the many other species of amphibians that like to bask in the Sun and heat themselves, notes Schmidt, who specializes in amphibians with info fauna, the national data and information center for Swiss fauna. He would like to see a study where the shelters are deployed and the populations recover.

But Schmidt says it may not be easy to manufacture and distribute a lot of shelters, get landowner permission, or reach the entire range of a species. “The challenges of the transition from ‘it works’ to ‘it is now widely used’ should not be underestimated.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office

Two of those eyes may have evolved into a part of the brain called the pineal gland

https://www.dailycamera.com/2026/01/23/nsf-ncar-boulder-new-owner-mesa-lab/

The National Science Foundation announced Friday that it will consider proposals for new private or public ownership to take over the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Mesa Lab in Boulder.

Friday’s announcement comes after the Trump administration made threats to dismantle NCAR in December, and on Dec. 17, the NSF announced its intent to restructure critical weather science infrastructure at NCAR.

The NSF published a Dear Colleague Letter requesting “expressions of interest in and/or concepts of operation” for the Mesa Lab, specifically seeking those interested in “ownership of the NSF NCAR Mesa Lab building” for private or public use. The Boulder lab is currently managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research on behalf of the NSF.

“We’re in touch with NSF to better understand how this process will unfold, and we’re continuing to do our work,” Boulder NCAR media relations manager David Hosansky wrote in an email to the Daily Camera.

The Daily Camera requested a further explanation of the letter from the NSF, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening.

The NSF also put out a call for those interested in “management and operations” of NCAR space weather activities and NCAR weather modeling and atmospheric observing capabilities. In addition to operation proposals, the NSF posed four questions to which it’s seeking responses. The foundation is seeking to know:

• Whether NCAR activities duplicate those of other organizations.

• If there are any new ideas for NCAR’s management and operations the NSF should consider.

• If there are other “concepts for management and operations of NCAR activities” that differ from the current model that the NSF should consider.

• What the performance objectives and metrics should be for a restructured atmospheric research center. Related Articles

The NSF is requesting that interested parties submit a document, limited to two or three pages per topic, describing ideas for operations and/or addressing the questions posed in the letter. The deadline for submissions is March 13.

“The materials received will be used to inform NSF’s future actions with respect to the components of NCAR and to ensure the products, services, and tools provided in the future align with the needs and expectations of stakeholders to the extent practicable,” the letter read.

Plans to transfer stewardship of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, located in Cheyenne, and plans to divest from or transfer two research aircraft that NCAR manages are being considered separately from this letter.

Paywall - An interstellar energetic and non-aqueous pathway to peptide formation - nature.com