a leaf warbler's gleanings

Even as we continue to live through the decimation of amphibians around the world, with many species teetering on the brink of extinction - if they haven't bit the bullet already - here comes news of a new species being discovered! And its a tiny one. Living in rather cool habitat: the little "pond" inside the pitcher of the carnivorous pitcher plant. Here's the story:

One of the world's smallest frogs has been discovered living inside pitcher plants in Borneo, reports Conservation International, a conservation group that is jointly supporting a campaign with IUCN to search for some of the world's "lost amphibians."

The species, described in Zootaxa by Indraneil Das and Alexander Haas of the Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and Biozentrum Grindel und Zoologisches Museum of Hamburg, is named Microhyla nepenthicola after the plant in which is was found, Nepenthes ampullaria, a species of pitcher plant from Malaysian Borneo. Many species of pitcher plants are carnivorous, relying on trapping of insects to supply nutrients otherwise not available in the resource-poor and acidic soils on which they typically grow. Nepenthes ampullaria instead subsists off decomposing organic matter that collects in its pitcher.

Microhyla nepenthicola lives in and around Nepenthes ampullaria. The frog deposit its eggs on the sides of the pitcher. When these hatch, the tadpoles grow in the liquid accumulated in the plant's insect-trapping cavity.

The new frog is a type of microhylid, a family of frogs under 15 millimeters in length. Adult males of the new species range between 10.6 and 12.8 mm or "about the size of a pea," according to Conservation International (CI), which notes it is the smallest frog yet discovered in Asia, Africa or Europe.

The small size and obscure habitat of the the frog has left it unknown to science until now, although museum collections contained specimen that went unrecognized as a new species.