NEW YORK: In the depths of an Indonesian rainforest, scientists have identified a fanged amphibian that is the first known frog that gives birth to tadpoles, instead of laying spawn.
The newly named frog was found in small puddles and side streams in a rainforest in Sulawesi Island in Indonesia. It’s a small animal, about 1.5 to 2 inches long.
In a paper in PLOS One describing the tadpole-bearing frog, an international research team named it Limnonectes larvaepartus, which means “giving birth to an early form of an animal.”
They first realized it could give birth to live tadpoles when UC Berkeley herpetologist Jimmy McGuire was trying to take a liver sample of a female frog. He cut into the frog’s abdomen, and, unexpectedly, a few dozen tadpoles slipped out.
We had captured some of them and at the time, we didn’t even know what they were,” he said. “Then we opened one up and out popped all these squirming tadpoles.”
Another time he thought was picking up a male frog when out came a handful of the tiny tadpoles less than half an inch long.
“I was trying to catch them so we wouldn’t lose any,” said McGuire. “We wanted to know the clutch count.”
Over 13 years of studying these frogs, McGuire and his colleagues witnessed 19 different instances of females either carrying or giving birth to live tadpoles.
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