New leopard frog found in New York. Picture credit: Matthew Schlesinger, New York Natural Heritage Program, via National Geographic.
By Jon Fern, Science Editor
It’s one of the most heavily populated places on Earth, and probably the last place you would imagine a new species to pop (or hop...) up in, but New York City is home to a frog that’s only now been described by science.
The leopard frog, Rana kauffeldi, is described in a paper published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution entitled A new species of leopard frog (Anura: Ranidae) from the urban northeastern US. Its natural habitat includes coastal marshes and low-lying floodplain, which explains why low-lying Staten Island, where the new species was found, suits this little amphibian so well.
“I’d spent three years studying leopard frogs in New Jersey and so I was familiar with how the call was supposed to sound like. After I spent some time on Staten Island I knew straight away that the call there was a different one entirely,” Jeremy Feinberg told the Independent. Feinberg was part of the team from Rutgers University that has been investigating the new frog and its range, now thought to span a strip of coastland from Connecticut all the way down to North Carolina.
Commenting on the study, Professor Brad Shaffer of the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “If there is a single lesson to take from this study it’s that those who love nature and want to conserve it need to shut down their computers, get outside and study the plants and animals in their own backyards.”
Still, it’s rare that something like this should happen. As the National Geographic put it, “Only the second new frog species found in the continental United States in the past 30 years, it (R. kauffeldi) remained hidden in plain sight in a city of 8.4 million people.”
