There's a new golden frog in the world.
Or at least, a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) researcher recently announced finding a frog that is pale gold in color in Colombia's high Andes cloud forests. It is called Pristimantis dorado, a name that acknowledges its golden color with the Spanish word for that, dorado, and references El Dorado, the mythical city of gold that the Spanish conquistadores sought in South America.
"The Spaniards assumed Colombia's wealth was its gold, but today we understand that the real riches of the country lie in its biodiversity," noted Andrew Crawford at the Universidad de Los Andes and a STRI research associate.
The new species belongs to a very diverse group with 465 species that are already recognized. Of those, 205 are from Colombia. It's likely that the Andes terrain led to many ground-dwelling frogs' further evolution. It is a type of evolutionary process in which eggs turn into itty-bitty frogs without having a tadpole phase.
Pristimantis dorado is about seven-tenths of an inch in length, one of the group's smaller species. In this group, some of the largest species reach two inches in length as adults.
The new golden frog lacks vocal sacs or vocal slits, which are used by many frog species to alert females to their mating availability. But the males in this new frog species are, oddly, still able to produce an irregular series of clicks that serves as a call.
This call alerted not only females but the STRI scientists, who found one of the frogs on a roadside around 8,700 feet in elevation, in the area around Chingaza National Park, which is about 10 miles east of Bogotá. Finding a new species so near a city of almost 10 million inhabitants says a lot about the huge amount of Earth's biodiversity still to be known.
"With this new species, Colombia now hosts 800 species of amphibians, second only to Brazil in total diversity," Crawford said. "Every year there are increasing numbers of new species of amphibians discovered and described. At this point we still can't even estimate what the final diversity of amphibians will be."
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is a part of the Smithsonian Institution that is headquartered in Panama City, Panama. Its focus is on learning about tropical nature and the link of nature and human welfare.
The discovery was recently published in the journal Amphibia Reptilia.
Follow Catherine Arnold on Twitter at @TreesWhales.
