Pea-Sized Frog Discovered In Borneo Jungle
10:15am UK, Thursday August 26, 2010
Lulu Sinclair
One of the world's smallest frogs has been found in the jungle of Borneo.
The pea-sized frog lives on a carnivorous plant
The frog, the size of a pea, has been found living in and around carnivorous plants on Borneo island, scientist Indraneil Das from University Malaysia Sarawakrevealed. He and a fellow scientist from Germany were doing field research on frogs when they spotted the tiny species on the edge of a road leading to the summit of a mountain in the Kubah National Park in 2006.
They were only found because he and colleague Alexander Haas tracked their singing of "harsh rasping notes" at dusk. "We heard the calls of this frog and we knew the calls of all frogs in the area and this was different," Dr Das explains.
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This just shows how much more there is left to discover in the jungles of Borneo, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
<cite> Scientist Indraneil Das
</cite> They caught them by making them jump on a white cloth near the pitcher plants where they live. "At first we couldn't see it but eventually we found it and I had to trap the frog in one of my baby son's clean white diapers in order to really see what it looked like, it was so tiny."
The tubular plants around which they live are carnivorous, killing insects such as ants, but do not harm the frogs - tadpoles grow in the liquid inside the plants. Adult males of the amphibians - full name Microhyla nepenthicola - range in size between 0.42in to 0.5in, Dr Das said.
"For biologists, this is a curiosity. This just shows how much more there is left to discover in the jungles of Borneo, it's just the tip of the iceberg." Sarawak and neighbouring Sabah states make up Malaysia's half of Borneo island, which is shared with Indonesia.
Dr Das is to lead a team into the jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia next month to search for a supposedly extinct toad last seen in 1922, as part of a global project to rediscover 100 species of "lost" amphibians. The findings were published by Das and Alexander Haas of the Biozentrum Grindel und Zoologisches Museum of Hamburg, Germany in peer-review journal Zootaxa last week.
