#tropical frog

[transcendragon]

New art! “Life Will Go On Glow Frog”. I love making art so much, I’m so glad to be getting back into it! It really helps my mental health

My original art made in Procreate, image description in alt text

[chasingrainbowsforever]

Red-Eyed Tree Frog Looking Over a Flower

Image by Mark Kostich /Getty Images

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Golden Poison Frogs: The Gold Standard

Golden poison frogs (Phyllobates terribilis) are a species of frog found only along the Pacific coast in the Amazon Rainforest of Columbia; their total range encompasses less than 5,000 square km;. Their prime habitat is near rivers, streams, and ponds, but the are able to survive in a variety of microhabitats along the forest floor thanks to the forest's extremely warm, humid climate.

The golden poison frog is perhaps noted for its crowning as the most poisonous species on the planet. A single adult contains enough poison in its skin to kill 2-3 grown humans, although the frog would have to be ingested for its toxins to be fatal. However, there is at least one species of snake, the fire-bellied snake (Erythrolamprus epinephalus) which is immune to the frog's toxins and often predates on juveniles. P. terribilis consumes a variety of insects, but gets its poison from the beetles in its diet, and without them individuals lose their toxicity.

Although tiny, the golden poison frog is hard to miss. They are the largest species of poison frog at a weight of 30 g (1 oz) and a length of 6 cm (2.4 in). Females are usually larger than males. The species is named for the most common color moroph, bright yellow, but populations may also come in green, orange, and white. The coloration is a warning to predators to stay away.

Golden poison frogs are typically active during the day. Members of the same sex are highly territorial, but populations within a small area can be quite large. Individuals defend their territory by calling loudly and performing a push-up motion, which can also serve to attract potential mates. The species can reproduce year-round, and both males and females have multiple partners.

After the female has laid a clutch of about 20 eggs, the male carries them on his back up a tree to a bromeliad or small tree hole filled with water. There the eggs hatch as tadpoles after 11-12 days. The tadpoles feed on algae and insect larvae until they metamorphose into froglets, which takes about 2 months. The froglets take a further year to fully mature, and adults may live for up to 5 years.

Conservation status: P. terribilis is classified as Endangered by the IUCN. The species has a relatively small home range, and is seriously threatened by habitat loss. However, there are many private, government, and NGO captive-bread populations across the globe.

Want to request some art or uncharismatic facts? Just send me proof of donation of any amount to any of the fundraisers on this list, or a Palestinian organization of your choice! Proof does not have to include any personal info– only the date, the amount, and the recipient. Even one dollar can go a long way!

Photos

Victor Fabio Luna-Mora

Micha L. Rieser

Leighton Pritchard

[tropic-havens]

Tree frog (Boophis madagascariensis) in the Peyrieras Madagascar Exotic Reserve

[oceaniatropics]

Spotted Tree Frog (Litoria spenceri), Mount Beauty, Victoria, Australia 

[third-world-punks]

Check out ✦ THIRD WORLD PUNKS ✦ for more alternative dark academia mood boards!

[colorsoutofearth]

Ecuadorean frog photos by Pete Oxford

Leaf frog (Agalychnis craspedopus)

Chachi tree frog (Hyla picturata)

Poison arrow frog (Epipedobates tricolor)

Poison arrow frog (Epipedobates tricolor)

Poison arrow frog (Dendrobates duellmani)

San Lucas marsupial frog (Gastrotheca pseustes)

[fatehbaz]

A thing that I love to do is to intentionally unlearn English common names for plants and animals. Ascribing of strict formal names to living things for processing through institutionalized knowledge systems is an act of capture. And I am not interested in capturing, possessing, any creature.

What do some English common names teach us about a creature? Names are powerful. These are things that I often contemplate together in relation to each other: “folk” taxonomy, animal naming conventions, erasure of local environmental knowledge, the theft and extraction of Indigenous language and knowledge, and rare and endemic species with specific microhabitat preferences.

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You might come to find that a creature, like a frog in the tropical Andes, is named for a museum curator in London who had never visited the Andes, or the frog is named after an eighteenth century plantation owner who contracted the European land surveyors to map the area.

There are so many creatures named after racists, eugenicists, violent colonizers. Of course, Linnaean taxonomic naming conventions were being established alongside the height of European maritime dominance, plantation slavery, and colonization of the American hemisphere, Australia, South Asia, the tropics.

A frog might be named after an imperial British adventurer who recorded the creature for audiences at European museums. They called “dibs” on the frog, despite the fact that local Indigenous communities may have had an ongoing relationship with the creature for centuries. So instead I’m interested in trying to learn a “folk” name for the creature, or instead I would apply a new name for an animal based on the geographic area, ecoregion, plant community, or ecocultural region that the creature was most closely associated with.

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Here’s a situation:

There is a relatively little-known salamander species. It is superlative. The terrestrial adults are enormous, and can be purple-ish in color, marked with gold speckles that seem to glow like glitter. They’re one of the only salamanders on the planet that can vocalize. They live in habitat alongside grizzly bears, mountain lion, wolverine, moose, unique lichen-eating mountain caribou, land snails, big ferns. The aquatic larvae can reach lengths of over 30 centimeters (1 foot), and they live not in still water like ponds and lakes as most other salamander larvae, but instead they swim around in fast-flowing streams.

It’s an endemic species. It lives in just a few small rivers’ watersheds, mostly in small, fast-flowing, cold, clear mountain streams in temperate rainforest ecosystems in the Columbia Mountains of the Northern Rockies, almost entirely within the arbitrary political borders of the US state of “Idaho,” on the traditional land of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) people and Schitsu’umsh (Skitswish/Coeur d’Alene) people.

And it’s official common name: “Idaho giant salamander.” Not cool. Does the salamander have a meaningful reciprocal relationship with a political entity less than 200 years old, or does the salamander have a relationship with the ancient cedars of the rainforest? Which has existed longer: the arbitrary political entity of Idaho, or the Nimiipuu people? What do some English common names teach us about a creature? Names are powerful. Is the salamander named after the streams, the source of its life? Is it named after the temperate rainforest ecoregion, this safe harbor of fertile vegetation? Does its name refer to the endemic tailed frogs or other aquatic creatures that it relies on for food? Does the name reference the Nimiipuu, who have known the amphibian for centuries? Even the region’s name (”Columbia Mountains”) is a reference to one of history’s most notorious celebrities.

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Here’s something from Robin Wall Kimmerer:

In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” [...] In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “it”s. [...] [W]hen we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, well, we know it now. We’re able to systematize it […]. It’s such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously if we just think about them [solely] as physical elements of the ecosystem. […] This comes back to what I think of as the innocent or childlike way of knowing. Actually, that’s a terrible thing to call  it. We say it’s an innocent way of knowing, and, in fact, it’s a very worldly and wise way of knowing. That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the  doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.

Words of Robin Wall Kimmerer. Interviewed by Krista Tippett. “On Being with Krista   Tippett - Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life.”   February 2016.

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It’s also important to me to clarify that, when referencing an Indigenous name or term for landmarks, places, plants, animals, etc. I only really feel comfortable doing so if the name is explicitly used by and/or confirmed to be accurate by speakers, researchers, knowledge-holders, etc. from that Indigenous community. And I also don’t want to use/share a name/term if the name/term was “collected” (appropriated, extracted) by a chauvinistic white academic or paternalistic Euro-American “ethnologist” or reproduced in a 1950s ethnobotany book or something. I especially don’t like relying on the testimony of, like, Euro-American missionaries or “traders’ who recorded terms in their personal journal in the 1750s or something.

How were those terms encountered?

How were they “extracted”?

Under duress?

Were these names, this environmental knowledge, willingly shared?

What ethical implications are there, of accepting secondhand information from an invading “pioneer”?

Many times, I’ll be reading a paper, maybe a “contempoary” paper from the past 10 years, and see references to a cool-sounding place-name or alternative name for a creature, and I’ve thought “wow, the connotations of the name sound really interesting, I wonder where this was learned,” and I’ll check the bibliography, and the “Indigenous name” was taken from a 1965 academic article, which itself was taken from a 1922 ethnology article sponsored by the F0rd Motor Company in pursuit of stealing local plant knowledge and land titles for rubber plantations or something, and that info itself was taken from an 1874 report from settler-colonial surveyors interviewing “locals” while traveling in company with an ex-government employee “cowboy” who had previously murdered at least 5 of the “locals.” So that, often in Euro-American “Knowledge” or “Science”, when trying to determine the Source Of A Fact, there is this blatant lineage of theft and violence and roundabout superficial self-referencing.

Even in relatively modern academic journals. Let’s say, in the 1990s, a European academic does “field research” in Amazonia. Maybe they record an “accurate” term, and I read about it in a paper. The academic says that they have a “profound respect” for “the culture”. Does this make it OK to “take” their terms? Does this make it more acceptable to “extract” a language as if it were a resource, a possession? Does it change the fact that the sponsoring academic institution or the publishing journal are both entangled with corporate extraction and ongoing (neo)colonial financialization, dispossession, debt, etc.?

So (1) you’re presented with names/terms which are probably inaccurate and which you have no way of confirming because of the convoluted way the term was passed down through settler-colonial knowledge-systematization institutions; and/or (2) more importantly, you’re presented with names/terms stolen, often at threat of violence; or (3) even in “good” scenarios with an accurate term and a so-called self-professed “respectful observer”, you’re presented with names/terms which have great power, connected to a specific culture and landscape, which should be treated with reverence and deep care, but which can easily be stolen and appropriated by popular media, wielding the power of the name in contexts where it doesn’t belong, a betrayal to the people, place, and/or creature.

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Names imply or explicitly reveal the life of a creature or place, and also imply the connections between the creature/place being named, and the other worlds and relationships it influences and interacts with.

If i am not from the community that conceived the term/language, (1) it doesn’t feel honorable appropriating their language for myself, especially if I don’t have ongoing personal connection to people, places; (2) it doesn’t feel honorable, or all that reliable, to accept at face value the accuracy of a language/term if it’s being reported secondhand by a Euro-American academic intermediary, especially if that language was recorded during periods when Euro-American observers were actively engaged in colonization; and (3) it doesn’t feel honorable to use what might even be accurate Indigenous language/terminology if it was recorded/learned/stolen/promoted by Euro-American observers, unless there is explicit permission from native speakers to use the word, or unless native speakers actively encourage the acknowledgement of the words, maybe for purposes like language revitalization.

There is power and knowledge in a name. using a name involves serious responsibility. i feel that some names aren’t for me to invoke.

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I think that maybe no name can do justice to the entire rich existence of a creature, but we can really do better than some English common names, especially in those cases when an animal is named after a lone individual human. And so, in naming, there might be a difficult decision to make. Do you name a creature for its behavior, its location, its appearance, its season of activity, its prefered habitat, its companion species? Maybe you have your own, personal, relationship with the creature. A living thing has so many interweaved relationships with others. Maybe its “meaning” changes with context or season or emotional state of the human observer. Maybe I will sometimes call the  “Idaho giant salamander” something more fitting. Maybe I’ll call it “the cedar salamander” or the “guardian of the waterfall pools” or “the giant of the stream” or “moss dragon” or whatever. Depends on the mood, context, whatever.

We are all of us, salamander and human, more rich and complex than associations with mere behavior, appearance, habitat preference, or the surveyors that try to capture and catalogue us. And sometimes, I’m uncomfortable enclosing us with a singular denomination, with a strict name. I don’t assume that I know enough about a living thing to possess it through formal naming conventions.

[bakedbakermom]

i do not understand people who struggle to get in the shower. it's basically my favorite place. i am pretty sure my ancestors were those monkeys who live in the hotsprings.

[lowcountry-gothic]

Blue morph of the Strawberry Poison-Frog (Oophaga pumilio) from Bocas del Toro, Panama. Photo by Ignacio Yúfera.

[bumblebeeappletree]

Many of the world’s most beloved frogs and amphibians are headed for extinction, but inside “The Ark” in Panama, some of those threatened species are given a fighting chance. Using innovative technology and breakthrough genetics, researchers have ignited a cadre of solutions to save these rare and cherished species.

The Ark at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama houses hundreds of large, captive communities of frogs, some of which no longer exist in the wild. Here, scientists hope to bring these species back from the brink of extinction and solve the world’s worst wildlife pandemic: an amphibian-killing fungus known as chytrid.

In a quarantined lab, these biologists bathe frogs in fungicide and hope to spark a viable immune response from the captive animals. Meanwhile, in the field, other researchers use artificial intelligence to listen to frog songs and identify so-called “lost frogs” that survive chytrid in the wild — any of which may hold the key to fighting the disease. Safeguarding a future for frogs isn't easy, but these tactics in Panama have been so successful that they’re being replicated in facilities across the globe. The effort may seem monumental, but the safety and preservation of amphibians worldwide hangs in the balance.

[gifs-of-puppets]

Happy First Day of Summer!

Souce: adam807

[littleg0blintreasures]

shhh…he’s sleeping…

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Lend an Ear to the Hole in the Head Frog

Huia cavitympanum, more commonly known as the hole-in-the-head frog, is a species of frog found only on the island of Borneo. It resides mainly in tropical forests, both in the lowlands and more mountainous regions, particularly those with fast flowing rivers.

The hole-in-the-head frog is named for its unique eardrums, which are recessed into the skull giving the appearance of holes in the sides of its head. This ear drum gives way to a canal similar to that of mammals, which enables H. cavitympanum to hear ultrasonic sounds (above 20 kHz). The species is otherwise quite plain in appearence, with a brown body marked with darker splotches and a stripe down its back. Adults can be anywhere from 4.6-8 cm (1.6-3.1 in) long; females tend to be larger than males.

Due to their ultrasonic calls, the hole-in-the-head frog can be quite difficult to locate, especially as they are active mainly at night. Like most frogs, the species is insectivorous, consuming a variety of beetles, flies, centipedes, and ants. They do most of their hunting along the forest floor, in the low undergrowth, or along riverbanks.

H. cavitympanum uses its high-pitched calls to locate mates along loud, fast-moving streams. Males gather at the edge of these streams and begin calling at the end of the dry season in August, and mating may continue well into the wet season. After mating, the females on rocks at the edge of the water line, and the emerging tadpoles cling to those rocks using an abdominal sucker until they fully mature. The lifespan of this species is unknown.

Conservation status: The IUCN has designated the hole-in-the-head frog as Least Concern. Despite its remote habitat, the species is threatened by habitat loss.

Want to request some art or uncharismatic facts? Just send me proof of donation of any amount to any of the fundraisers on this list, or a Palestinian organization of your choice!

Photos

Sandra Goutte

Alexander Haas

Sandra Goutte

[tropic-havens]

poison dart frog, amazon rainforest by Daniel Carmona

[oceaniatropics]

Tasmanian tree frog, Bonorong, Tasmania, Australia