One of Nature’s Most Extreme Dads, the Darwin’s Frog, Is Going Extinct

In 1834, Charles Darwin discovered a strange animal during his exploration of Chile’s southern coast. The creature, a small frog, was shaped like a leaf with a pointed nose, but appeared puffed up as if had been blown full of air, like a balloon. As it turned out, those fat male frogs hadn’t been gorging themselves on too many mosquitoes, but instead were enacting duties that earn them distinction as one of nature’s best dads. They were incubating several of their squirming babies in their vocal sac.

These peculiar animals, known as Darwin’s frogs, are today divided into two species, one that occurs in northern Chile, and another that lives in southern Chile and Argentina. When a female Darwin’s frogs lay her eggs, her mate keep a careful watch until the tadpoles hatch. The eager dad then swallows his young, allowing the babies to safely grow within his vocal sac until they turn into frogs and are ready to strike out on their own. Here, you can see a dutiful papa frog seemingly vomit up his living young:

World's Weirdest - Frog Father "Spits Out" Young

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Northerly Darwin’s frogs, however, have not been spotted in the wild since 1980. Researchers are nearly certain the species is extinct. Meanwhile, their southerly cousins are in steep decline and seem to be heading down extinction’s death row as well. For once, it seems that humans are not entirely to blame for these biodiversity disasters (unlike the western black rhino, which bit the dust a couple years ago after enduring decades of poaching for its valuable but medicinally worthless horn, used as an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine). Instead, the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus, researchers report today in PLoS One, is likely to blame.

The chytrid fungus has popped up in amphibians in North and South America, Europe and Australia. The fungus infects the animals’ skin, preventing them from absorbing water and other nutrients. The fungus can rapidly decimate amphibian populations it comes into contact with, and has been called (pdf) “the worst infectious disease ever recorded among vertebrates in terms of the number of species impacted, and its propensity to drive them to extinction” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

To identify chytrid as the likely culprit behind the Darwin’s frogs disappearance and decline, researchers from Chile, the UK and Germany conducted a bit of historical sleuthing. They dug up hundreds of archived specimens of Darwin’s frogs and closely related species dating from 1835 until 1989, and then tested them all for fungal spores (the problematic form of chytrid fungus was first recorded in the 1930s and reached epidemic-status around 1993, but researchers aren’t certain of when it first emerged). They also took around 800 skin swabs between 2008 and 2012 from 26 populations of still-living southern Darwin’s frogs and other similar frog species that live nearby.

Six of the old museum specimens, all collected between 1970 and 1978–just before the northern Darwin’s frog’s disappearance–tested positive for the disease. More than 12 percent of the living frogs tested positive for the fungal spores. In places where the Darwin’s frog has gone extinct or is experiencing drastic declines, however, rates of infection jumped to 30 percent in other amphibian species.  Although these events don’t prove that the fungus killed the northern Darwin’s frogs and are now wiping out the southern species, the researchers strongly suspect that is the case.

Despite evidence that the disease has spread throughout the Darwin’s frog’s range, the researchers are not giving up on hope to save one of the world’s greatest dads from extinction. “We may have already lost one species, the Northern Darwin’s frog, but we cannot risk losing the other one,” Claudio Soto-Azat, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. ”There is still time to protect this incredible species.”

Rachel Nuwer | | READ MORE

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.