UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN (Lawrence, Kansas) 07 October 09 Doctoral student discovers fanged frog (Ray Segebrecht)

For David McLeod, fame came unexpectedly through an overnight excursion deep into the Mekong Delta area of northeast Thailand.

McLeod, Kitchener, Ontario doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology, had hiked with local rangers to a remote stream in the jungle to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation, but the excitement started when he found two specimens of frogs.

One was typical for the region and came from a small and well-documented species. The other, however, was of the bird-eating, fanged variety, which more than doubled the first in size and had never before been recorded. Its discovery has earned McLeod recognition this fall by major news networks, such as CNN, after the World Wildlife Fund released a major report two weeks ago.

“I think the significance was that it was described from a location that has been a well-studied area for the last 40 or more years,” McLeod said. “We’ve had researchers at this site since the 1960s. There’s still indescribable diversity right underneath our noses.”

The species, called limnonectes megastomias or the Khorat big mouthed frog, which measures 12 to 15 centimeters long, isn’t the only fanged amphibian whose discovery has given a University affiliate newfound notoriety this fall. Rafe Brown, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, also released an article he co-authored on a separate species he discovered in 1994. Brown said he found his “bullfrog-sized” specimens on Mindanao Island in the Phillippines.

Both species, Brown said, are “sit-and-wait” predators who lunge at their prey and eat it whole.

“They’re big voracious predators,” Brown said. “They pretty much eat anything that’s smaller than them that comes around.”

Brown said the “fangs” were not actually teeth, but instead “prostheses” that the frogs develop as secondary sex characteristics.

Brown said male fanged frogs developed more prominent prostheses than females. He speculated they most likely used their fangs for fighting against one another for mating rights.

“It’s all guesswork at this point,” Brown said. “We know so little about their biology that we don’t really know what they do with them at this point.”

Although Brown said the species he discovered had not reached the same level of publicity outside the scientific community because its location was lesser known, the finding still had noteworthy significance.

“Imagine finding an undiscovered species as big as a bullfrog in North America,” Brown said. “That would be a very big deal. There’s these places in parts of Asia that are so poorly known and so seldom visited by scientists that big large bodied animals have gone unnoticed by science for the last hundred years.”

The Natural History Museum has displayed video footage from the discovery McLeod made this fall both on its Web site and in its fourth floor lobby, Exhibits Director Bruce Scherting said.

Scherting said he hoped that by spring, the museum would update its Web site to display research by McLeod, Brown and other researchers on the biodiversity staff more prominently. He said he had also discussed plans to redesign the sixth floor to entirely dedicate it to showcasing their research.

“I think most people actually don’t realize that there is a research component to the museum,” Scherting said. “There’s kind of a mismatch between what’s on exhibit and what actually goes on in the building.”Both McLeod and Brown said they hoped to continue to contribute to the study of the limnoectes, or fanged, genus of frogs. Brown said this time, he wanted to extend the research to include genetic studies for frog species that visually could not be distinguished from one another.

He said regardless of what he found, he would always remember the excitement of recognizing his first new species in the field.

“You sort of say hallelujah, and you’re the person that gets to choose the scientific name,” Brown said. “You have a moment of discovery.”
Doctoral student discovers fanged frog

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• KS Press: Student discovers fanged frog - W von Papineäu, Wed Oct 14 20:46:41 2009