#Starry Night Harlequin Toad

[herpsandbirds]

Starry Night Harlequin Toad aka Gowna (Atelopus arsyecue), family Bufonidae, endemic to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

Threatened by habitat loss and the Chytrid fungus.

photographs: Jaime Culebras & Beto_Rueda

[worldsandemanations]

Starry Night Harlequin Toad aka Gowna (Atelopus arsyecue), family Bufonidae, endemic to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia photographs: Jaime Culebras & Beto_Rueda

[dendroica]

Arhuaco community of Colombia allows scientists to photograph 'lost' toad

For nearly 30 years, the starry night harlequin toad (Atelopus arsyecue), a tiny amphibian, named for its glossy black skin with white spots that resembles a starry, dark sky, remained undetected by scientists. But the indigenous Arhuaco people of the Sogrome community living in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, one of the world’s tallest coastal mountains and the only place the toad is known from, have been residing alongside the species for generations. They not only share their mountain home with the toad, but consider the animal sacred and an integral part of their culture. According to the Arhuaco people, gouna, as the toad is locally known, tells them about their environment, indicating the right time to plant crops or perform spiritual ceremonies.

“The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a place that we consider sacred, and harlequin toads are guardians of water and symbols of fertility,” Kaneymaku Suarez Chaparro, a member of the Sogrome community and a biology student at the Francisco José de Cladas District University, said in a statement.

Recently, the community opened its doors to some conservation biologists, allowing them to take photographs of the critically endangered toads and share them with the wider scientific community, the U.S.-based Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC) announced in a press release.

“With the starry night harlequin toad records, we confirm that Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is one of the most important sites for the conservation of harlequin toads in Latin America,” Luis Alberto Rueda, a professor at Universidad del Magdalena and cofounder of Fundación Atelopus, said in the statement. Fundación Atelopus is the Colombian NGO that partners with GWC and is working to document the toad.

“We are tremendously grateful to the Arhuaco people for giving us this opportunity to work with them,” added Lina Valencia, Colombia conservation officer at GWC.

Harlequin toads, a group of vibrant toads found in the American tropics, are among the world’s most threatened amphibians. Of the 96 known species of harlequin toads, 80 are endangered, critically endangered or extinct in the wild, according to the IUCN Red List. The deadly chytrid fungus in particular, which has decimated amphibian populations around the world, has hit the harlequin toads hard. And researchers were worried that the starry night harlequin toad, which hadn’t been recorded by scientists in nearly three decades, had been wiped out by the fungal disease.

[lichen-thr0pe]

Sir David Attenborough as frogs 🐸

We 💚 you, David! Thanks for loving amphibians!

1. Strawberry Poison Frog (Oophaga pumilio) ©️Austin Penner

2. Blue Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates tinctorius) ©️Frankfurt Zoo

3. Starry Night Harlequin Toad (Atelopus arsyecue) @fundacionatelopus

4. Blood Rain Frog (Pristimantis erythros) ©️F. Cisneros-Heredia

5. Polka-dot Treefrog (Boana punctata) ©️Dirk Ercken

6. African Gray Treefrog (Chiromantis xerampelina) ©️Ton Rulkens

7. American Toad (Anaxyrus americanus) ©️Ed Schneider

8. Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes) ©️Charles H. Smith

9. Red-eyed Treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) ©️Geoff Gallice

11. Harlequin Toad (Atelopus cf. hoogmoedi) ©️Daniela Rößler

[focusonthegoodnews]

Back from the abyss: These are the animal species that resurfaced in 2019 after they were feared lost Good News Notes: "Humanity has grown accustomed to bidding farewell to species of animals as time goes on.

[typhlonectes]

The Starry Night Toad (Atelopus arsyecue) is a harlequin toad endemic to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

photograph by Beto Rueda | Wikipedia CC

[ezatluba]

The Mindo harlequin frog is one of 25 species in the Atelopus genus, one of the hardest hit by the chytrid fungus.

‘Extinct’ toad rediscovery offers hope amid amphibian apocalypse

If the Mindo harlequin toad has developed resistance to chytrid disease, that may be a sign that the global epidemic is abating.

JASON BITTEL

APRIL 27, 2020

Melissa Costales stood in the dark, listening to the sounds of insects chittering in the cloud forests of northern Ecuador.

It was August 2019 and Costales, a conservation biologist at University of New Brunswick, had traveled with colleagues to a private reserve in search of rainfrogs—small, brown amphibians that look like fallen leaves. As the cool of the night set in, the team had already found nearly a dozen rainfrog specimens, a good haul by any standards.

Then one of the scientists noticed a bright fleck of green on a low-hanging leaf, and everyone crouched down in awe.

“There it was,” says Costales, “the legendary Atelopus mindoensis!”

Before that night, A. mindoensis—commonly known as the Mindo harlequin toad—hadn’t been seen alive in 30 years. Most believed the species to be extinct, a victim of the fungal disease called chytrid.

Over the past three decades, chytrid has ravaged amphibian populations worldwide. The disease disrupts the animals’ ability to absorb oxygen and water through their skin, and it has hit species within the Atelopus genus harder than most. (Read more about the debate over the “amphibian apocalypse.”)

But the rediscovery of the Mindo harlequin toad could mean there’s hope yet for this family of amphibians, experts say.

“The fact that it has reappeared after 30 years is possibly because they have become resistant to [chytrid],” says Costales, who recently published a study on the discovery in the journal Herpetological Notes.

Scientists have documented a handful of amphibians that have developed a resistance to chytrid. Among them: Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs, variable harlequin frogs, and common rocket frogs.

But as has been the case with coronavirus in humans, there hasn’t been enough testing to know the true scope of the recovery, says Jamie Voyles, a disease ecologist at the University of Nevada in Reno.

“We know from lots of diseases, including the current pandemic, that infectious diseases and outbreaks tend to subside,” says Voyles, who wasn’t involved in the new discovery. “There’s an outbreak stage, but then frequently, there's a drop-off in terms of the severity of disease within a population. And so we have experienced a similar thing with amphibians.”

Outbreak survivors?

There are 25 species of Atelopus in Ecuador, and all of them are currently classified as either threatened, critically endangered, or presumed extinct. More than half of the species haven’t been seen since the 1980s.

The reappearance of the Mindo harlequin toad makes it the ninth species in the Atelopus genus to come back from the dead, so to speak, since 2003. (Read more about the starry night toad’s rediscovery.)

Like many of its kin, the half-inch-long toad is striking. It’s the color of a fresh lime with a few brown spots. Its eyes are jet black, with irises that look like they’ve been wrapped in gold foil.

After Costales and colleagues made the discovery last August, they saw toads five more times when they returned to the same reserve, whose name they’re keeping confidential. Three of the sightings were of juvenile toads, which means the species is reproducing—a good sign, Costales says.

Though chytrid is know to be present in the vicinity, two of the toads that the team captured did not test positive for it. This could be because the toads never come into contact with the fungi—but it also might that these amphibians have evolved a way to fend off chytrid spores.

The lesser long-nosed bat is one of only a few bat species that feeds almost exclusively on nectar. In Mexico, these bats drink nectar from agave plants, which inadvertently helps tequila producers pollinate their agave crop.

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Although the island fox is one of the smallest foxes on earth, it is the largest terrestrial mammal living on California’s Channel islands. Four to five pounds in weight, it’s similar in size to a house cat.

Blue iguanas are tough, large-bodied lizards that live long and reproduce often. These exceptionally rare reptiles can reach upwards of five feet in length and weigh more than 25 pounds.

“It’s certainly possible that this is what would be called a relic population,” says Voyles, “meaning that it had gone through a bottleneck of some sort, and what we’re seeing are the survivors after the outbreak.”

Hold your harlequins

“I think this is super-exciting,” says Cori Richards-Zawacki, a herpetologist at the University of Pittsburgh and Voyles’ collaborator.

“Every Atelopus species that is 'rediscovered' highlights the importance of continued surveillance, and the opportunity we have to learn from these resilient creatures about the mechanisms of recovery after epidemics," she said by email. (Learn about “ground zero” of the amphibian apocalypse.)

The rediscovery of the Mindo harlequin toad could also serve as a reminder to exercise caution before declaring a species extinct, says Richards-Zawacki: “It's hard to get funding to survey for endangered species, but near impossible to get funding to survey for extinct species.”

That’s why Costales is working to make sure the Mindo harlequin toad doesn’t slip through the cracks again.

She and the Zoology Museum of the University San Francisco de Quito have already begun to assemble a monitoring program for the species. In the future, Costales hopes to raise enough money to buy and protect some land near where the healthy A. mindoensis was found.

“Although the newly found toads are not infected with the chytrid fungus,” she says, “their survival is not guaranteed.”

[distribuidoramaga10]

#Repost @leonardodicaprio • • • • • • #Regram #RG @earthalliance: Today’s news about the ‘rediscovery’ of the Starry Night Harlequin Toad is a testament not only to the incredible knowledge of indigenous people about the natural world, but to their critical role in protecting wildlife and wildlands. Thanks to the Arhuaco people of the Sogrome community in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, for the first time since 1991 biologists have documented this stunning toad. Now the community’s spiritual leaders and authorities will work with biologists from @fundacionatelopus to bring together both the scientific and spiritual perspectives to best continue protecting the amphibians. @global_wildlife_conservation @amaslasierra Photo courtesy of Fundacion Atelopus (em São Paulo, Brazil) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6BKQXtHas1Yi6HEg_uwoYEXHKlDfg9z4tcdE40/?igshid=1n2ja8tvjivfm

[herpsandbirds]

PLEASE DO YOU HAVE ANY FROGS???

Oh my sweet summer child, you've had the frogs here with you all along...

Magnificent Tree Frog (Ranoidea splendida), family Hylidae, endemic to the Kimberleys of Western Australia

Formerly in the genus Litoria.

photograph by Reptiles4all 

Goliath Frog (Conraua goliath), family Ranidae, found in Cameroon and Equitorial Guinea in West Africa

ENDANGERED.

This is the largest extant frog, growing to a length of 32 cm (12.6 in) snout to vent, and weighing up to 3.25 kg (7.2 lb).

photograph by Mark-Oliver Rödel - Berlin Museum for Natural History

Common Midwife Toad (Alytes cisternasii), male with eggs, family Alytidae, Spain

The male entwines the eggs around his hind legs, and carries them until they are ready to hatch. He then takes them to a body of fresh water.

photograph by Pedro Verdejo

Emei Mustache Toad aka Taosze Spiny Toad, (Leptobrachium boringii), family Megophryidae, endemic to SE China

ENDANGERED.

The larger males grow keratinized spines on the upper lip, which they use to defend territories, during the breeding season. The spines fall off after the breeding season.

photograph: Jingsong Shi

Starry Night Harlequin Toad aka Gowna (Atelopus arsyecue), family Bufonidae, endemic to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED.

Threatened by habitat loss and the Chytrid fungus.

photographs: Jaime Culebras & Beto_Rueda

[lucriasafinancial]

FOUND: Lost Starry Night Harlequin Toad Makes Radiant Return to Science ‘Rediscovery’ of starry night harlequin toad highlights Integral Role of Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge and Traditions in Wildlife…

[miblogdegatos]

RT @Newsweek: Spectacular starry night harlequin toad rediscovered after being lost to science for 30 years https://t.co/eLeoHEuAqy