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January 13, 2025

'This Toad Is So Tiny That They Call It a Flea'

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[Brachycephalus dacnis, the second-smallest species of vertebrate on the planet, was discovered in southeastern Brazil and measures less than 0.7 centimeters long. Credit: Lucas Botelho]

Above, the headline of a New York Times story heralding the discovery of the second-smallest vertebrate known to exist on our planet.

Screenshot 2024-10-30 at 11.28.17 AM

[Brachycephalus dacnis sings like a cricket and does not have tadpoles.Credit: Lucas Botelho]

From the Times article:

"We are talking about the limits of life size on Earth," said Luís Felipe Toledo, a herpetologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil.

Brazil's Atlantic forest has many frogs of the Brachycephalus genus, which are known also as saddleback toads. Their penchant for springing around and leaping distances about 30 times their body length has led to the nickname "flea toadlets."

"There are untold numbers of unknown tiny frogs out there," says Mark Scherz, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who was not involved in this study. He added that "these small species have been overlooked previously, by virtue of how hard they can be to find and collect."

Dr. Toledo's team also ran specialized high-resolution CT scans on the toadlet to uncover more about the inner workings of how a frog could still be a frog when it is this miniaturized.

While frogs usually have four fingers on their hands and five on their feet, B. dacnis, like other miniature frogs, has two fingers on its hands and three on its feet. Parts of its inner ears are missing too.

While miniaturization makes these frogs vulnerable to tiny predators, like ants and spiders, the trade-off seems worth it from an evolutionary perspective, said Jodi Rowley, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Australian Museum, who was not involved in the study.

"Miniaturization allows frogs to live in a whole new world that larger frogs simply can't get into," Dr. Rowley said, like thick leaf litter. In addition to providing shelter from predators, such spaces "are full of very tiny food that bigger frogs can't take advantage of."

Given that the Brazilian Atlantic forest has been severely deforested, learning more about these tiny frogs aids their conservation.

"So much of our biodiversity, known and unknown, is small and camouflaged and, not surprisingly, often goes unnoticed," Dr. Rowley said.

January 13, 2025 at 12:01 PM | Permalink


Comments

Why "... less than 0.7 centimeters ..."? Why not "less than 7 millimeters"?

Posted by: antares | Jan 13, 2025 2:19:24 PM

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