Update
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
Clearly, this new frog
species is awesomeWe’ve all heard the expression ‘wearing your heart
on your sleeve’, but few of us can pull off that trick
with the aplomb of a newly discovered species of
frog. The tiny amphibian’s heart is clearly visible at
all times, thanks to the translucent skin on its chest.
The frog, which measures just 2cm in length, has
been named Hyalinobatrachium yaku, and it has just
been described for the first time in a paper
published in the journal ZooKeys by a team of
scientists led by Juan M Guayasamin from
Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito. It
falls into a family of frogs called Centrolenidae, or
‘glass frogs’, all of which have translucent skin on
their abdomen that renders their liver, stomach and
intestines visible. In H. yaku, however, this
translucence extends to the chest area, putting thefrog’s heart on view.
All known Centrolenidae species are native to
Central and South America, and H. yaku is no
different, with three populations discovered in
Ecuador. As these three populations are quite widely
dispersed, lying some 110km from each other, it’s
believed the frog may make its home across a much
wider swathe of Ecuador and neighbouring Peru.
Intriguingly, the three populations of H. yaku so far
discovered exhibit varying behavioural
characteristics. In two areas, they have been found
only on the underside of leaves hanging a metre or
so above shallow, slow-moving streams. However,
in the third area, the frogs were located on the leaves
of small shrubs and ferns lying more than 30m from
the nearest water source.NEWLY DISCOVERED FROG
HAS A VISIBLE HEART
ZOOLOGYPHOTOS: JAMIE CULEBRAS/ROSS MAYNARD, NASA