frog in Biological News

Biologists rediscover endangered frog population

For the first time in nearly 50 years, a population of a nearly extinct frog has been rediscovered in the San Bernardino National Forest's San Jacinto Wilderness. Biologists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assessing suitability of sites to re-establish frogs and scientists from the San Dieg...

Climate change effects on imperiled Sierra frog examined

Climate change can have significant impacts on high-elevation lakes and imperiled Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that depend upon them, according to U.S. Forest Service and University of California, Berkeley, scientists. Their findings appear in the current issue of the journal " Herpetologic...

UGA study reveals ecosystem-level consequences of frog extinctions

Athens, Ga. Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They're victims of a fungus that's decimating amphibian populations worldwide. Such catastrophic declines have been documented for more than a decade, but until recently scientist...

Australian frog species chooses not to put eggs in 1 basket

A groundbreaking new study into the mating and nesting practices of a common Australian frog has found they partner up to eight males sequentially the highest recorded of any vertebrate. Dr Phillip Byrne, from Monash University's School of Biological Sciences, has researched the frog species B...

New study points to agriculture in frog sexual abnormalities

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot. But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals p...

Harlequin frog rediscovered in remote region of Colombia

Bogot, Colombia, March 11, 2008After 14 years without having been seen, several young scientists supported by the Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP), have rediscovered the Carrikeri Harlequin Frog (Atelopus carrikeri) in a remote mountainous region in Colombia. The critically endangered Ca...

Scientists discover 'giant fossil frog from hell'

A team of researchers, led by Stony Brook University paleontologist David Krause, has discovered the remains in Madagascar of what may be the largest frog ever to exist. The 16-inch, 10-pound ancient frog, scientifically named Beelzebufo, or devil frog, links a group of frogs that lived 65 to ...

Nutrient pollution drives frog deformities by ramping up infections, says CU-Boulder study

High levels of nutrients used in farming and ranching activities fuel parasite infections that have caused highly publicized frog deformities in ponds and lakes across North America, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The study showed increased levels of nitr...

New golden frog discovered in remote region of Colombia

Bogot, Colombia, August 28, 2007 A new poisonous frog was recently discovered in a remote mountainous region in Colombia by a team of young scientists supported by the Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP). The new frog, which is almost two centimetres in length, was given the name the ?golden f...

Colombian frog believed extinct found alive

Researchers exploring a Colombian mountain range found surviving members of a species of Harlequin frog believed extinct due to a killer fungus wiping out amphibian populations in Central and South America. The discovery of what could be the last population of the painted frog (Atelopus ebenoides...

Poison dart frog mimics gain when birds learn to stay away

Studying neotropical poison dart frogs, biologists at the University of Texas at Austin uncovered a new way that the frog species can evolve to look similar, and it hinges on the way predators learn to avoid the toxic, brightly colored amphibians. In the Mar. 8 issue of Nature, Catherine Darst a...

Clawed frog helps Fanconi anemia research make leaps

A large, clawed frog is helping Oregon Health & Science University researchers gather a princely sum of knowledge on Fanconi anemia, a rare, genetic, cancer-susceptibility syndrome. Scientists in the OHSU School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology are the first to ...

Carnegie donates landmark clones to biology

...the pore activity by using mutant proteins that cannot shut the pores off with their C-terminus to see how they work in yeast and immature eggs of the frog Xenopus in the presence of ammonium. The researchers were totally surprised that the mechanism in which three subunits regulate each other was f...

Naming evolution's winners and losers

...han 9,000 bird species, more than 5,400 mammal species, approximately 5,500 frog species, some 3,000 snake species and 5,200 lizard species, Alfaro said. The number of frog species, although it sounds high, is about what Alfaro would expect, given ...

Disease threat may change how frogs mate

...search followed concerns over the survival of wild frog populations in the UK. Ranavirus, which had its fi...ic make-up of populations, and indicates that wild frog populations that have been infected with this viru...ved with the animal's immune system. As the common frog is generally thought to mate randomly, this is a m...

Super-sleepers could help super-sizers!

...onserve energy when resources are scarce. But when it comes to switching to energy-saving mode, the champion by far among vertebrates is the burrowing frog ( Cyclorana alboguttata ), which can survive for several years buried in the mud in the absence of any food or water. How do they accomplish this feat...

New species of phallus-shaped mushroom named after California Academy of Sciences scientist

... says Drewes. "I have been immortalized in the scientific record." Phallus drewesii is not the first species to bear Drewes' name. A small moss frog native to South Africa ( Arthroleptella drewesii ) and a blind worm snake from Kenya ( Leptotyphlops drewesi ) were described in 1994 and 1996, respec...

Rainforest rehab in every sense

... since May 2008. Over the next two years, another 200 nodes will be installed, some of which will measure biodiversity indicators, such as bird and frog calls. CSIRO ICT Centre Research Scientist, Darren Moore, said the sensors are solar-powered and have been developed specifically for monitoring th...

UCLA scientists discover ultrasonic communication among frogs

...ntists report for the first time on the only known frog species that can communicate using purely ultrason...ard by humans. Known as Huia cavitympanum , the frog lives only on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo... 2 or 3 kHz. While most of the more than 5,000 frog species worldwide have eardrums that are flat on t...

Aussie meat ants may be invasive cane toad's Achilles' heel

...ufo (from the Latin name for the toxic toad) compared habitat use and activity patterns in meat ants, metamorph cane toads and seven native Australian frog species. They found that, unlike the native frogs, cane toads are poorly equipped to escape the meat ants. According to Shine: "The spread of cane ...

Two innovative University of Texas at Austin biologists become HHMI Early Career Scientists

... studies morphogenesishow tissues, organs and organisms develop their shapes. His interest in this field began as an undergraduate when he manipulated frog embryos and watched them develop in a dish of pond water. He later found that activating a single gene in the embryos triggers a series of shape-shift...

Frog's immune system is key in fight against killer virus

...ueen Mary, University of London have discovered how changes to a frog's immune system may be the key to beating a viral infection which is devastating frog populations across the UK. Communities of common frogs (Rana temporaria) are being struck down by a foreign virus which is estimated to be killing...

'Freaks' help scientist unravel nature and nurture

... an incubation temperature that was too high. Similarly, a human may end up with an extra set of hands because of a mutation, but the same defect in a frog can be caused by a parasite. Or consider the fact that mammals, including humans, possess distinct chromosomes -- the X and Y -- for generating mal...

Carnegie's Donald Brown receives lifetime achievement award from Society for Developmental Biology

...rogs. The many developmental changes that occur when a tadpole turns into a frog are controlled entirely by thyroid hormone. By studying its role in amphibi...one-gene interactions. He used thyroid hormone-induced metamorphosis in the frog Xenopus laevis to identify genes and gene pathways regulated by the hormone...

10 new amphibian species discovered in Colombia

...e family (Colostethus, Ranitomeya and Anomaloglossus genera), one harlequin frog of the Atelopus genus, two species of rain frogs of the Pristimantis genera...a of South America, including a salamander ( Bolitoglossa taylori ), a rain frog ( Pristimantis pirrensis ), a small lizard ( Ptychoglossus myersi ) and a s...

First Science from the Compact Light Source: A miniature synchrotron for your home lab

... VIDEO: This data for this video were taken by the DPCI collaboration using the Compact Light Source X-ray beam. The tomographic image of the frog above was reconstructed from 60... Click here for more information. ...

Pitt research finds that low concentrations of pesticides can become toxic mixture

...t's School of Arts and Sciences, exposed gray tree frog and leopard frog tadpoles to small amounts of the 10 pesticides tha...e of all 10 chemicals killed 99 percent of leopard frog tadpoles as did the insecticide-only mixture; the ...

Red-eyed treefrog embryos actively avoid asphyxiation inside their eggs

...opical Research Institute's laboratories in Gamboa, Panama, discovered that frog embryos at a very early developmental stage actively respond to oxygen leve...ady to hatch after only four days. By delaying hatching by a few more days, frog embryos significantly increase their chances of survival as tadpoles in the...

Study rules out inbreeding as cause of amphibian deformities

...valent to fingers and toes). That is double the rate of malformation found in newts, a related amphibian, but on par and with frequencies seen in many frog species, said assistant professor of forestry and natural resources Rod Williams. "This is really the first study to test - and disprove - the hypo...

New CU-Boulder study shows diversity decreases chances of parasitic disease

...d tadpoles were joined in the tanks with gray tree frog tadpoles, parasitic infections in the toads droppe...lead author of the study. The study showed tree frog tadpoles acted as "sponges" for the trematode para... were subsequently killed by the immune systems of frog tadpoles, said Johnson. As a result, fewer parasi...

Modern genetics vs. ancient frog-killing fungus

...Amphibian Assessment states that 43 percent of all frog species are declining in population, with less tha...ing increases. Although there are many reasons for frog decline, including climate change and habitat loss...cally is responsible for a lot of the catastrophic frog die-offs during the past decade." Previous stud...

Forsyth scientists trigger cancer-like response from embryonic stem cells

...ehavior. The researchers disrupted a natural bioelectrical mechanism within frog embryonic stem cells and trigged a cancer-like response, including increase...eam interrupted the flow of potassium through KCNQ1 in parts of the Xenopus frog embryo. This resulted in a striking alteration of the behavior of one type ...

NIH EUREKA award funds research at WPI aimed at turning adult skin cells into stem-like cells

...lity to form blastemas. To accomplish this, the team placed the cells in a lab dish and exposed them to an extract from the eggs of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). In the past, this extract had been shown to activate at least one gene specific to stem cells. In the NIH project, the team led b...

Dying frogs sign of a biodiversity crisis

... of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations o...Yosemite National Park. This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its f...ecently, they also succumbed. There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said. The first...

World's smallest snake found in Barbados

...--was discovered by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Hedges and his colleagues also are the discoverers of the world's smallest frog and lizard species, which too were found on Caribbean islands. The most recent discovery will be published on 4 August 2008 in the journal Zootaxa ....

Ultrasonic frogs can tune their ears to different frequencies

... Researchers have discovered that a frog that lives near noisy springs in central China can...ous research by two of the authors showed that the frog produces and responds to ultrasonic calls. In the ...e same sound stimulus. Even the eardrums of a dead frog will respond with unchanging predictability. Pa...

From humming fish to Puccini: Vocal communication evolved with ancient species

...a Puccini aria or, alas, even to the simplest Celine Dion melody. But the neural circuitry that led to the human love song not to mention birdsongs, frog thrums and mating calls of all manner of vertebrates was likely laid down hundreds of millions of years ago with the hums and grunts of the homely pi...

When fish talk, scientists listen

...ircuitry that midshipman use to vocalize develops in a similar region of the central nervous system as the circuitry that allows a human to laugh or a frog to croak, evidence that the ability to make and respond to sound is an ancient part of the vertebrate success story. The research is presented by A...

Researchers catch ion channels in their opening act

... original state, Posson studied ion channels inserted into the membranes of frog eggs. He tested the two models using a fluorescence technique called Lantha...proach called electrophysiology that involves inserting electrodes into the frog egg. This gave him the ability to change the voltage across the membrane an...

Killer whales, blind bats, discriminating dolphins, mating birds

...ounds are those we cannot hear -- like the croaks made by a rare species of frog that communicates ultrasonically or the high-pitched noises bats use to fin...ence of ultrasonic communication in an amphibian: the concave-eared torrent frog ( Amolops tormotus ), found in Huangshan Hot Springs, China. The males of t...