Carrie Arnold reports at National Geographic that on a nighttime walk through Reserva Las Gralarias in Ecuador in 2009, Katherine Krynak spotted a well-camouflaged, marble-size amphibian that was covered in spines. The next day, Krynak pulled the frog from the cup and set it on a smooth white sheet of plastic for Tim to photograph. It wasn't "punk "--it was smooth-skinned. She assumed that, much to her dismay, she must have picked up the wrong frog. "I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss," says Krynak. "The spines came back... we simply couldn't believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth."
Krynak didn't find another punk rocker frog until 2009, three years after the first sighting. The second animal was covered in thorny spines, like the first, but they had disappeared when she took a closer look. The team then took photos of the shape-shifting frog every ten seconds for several minutes, watching the spines form and then slowly disappear. It's unclear how the frog forms these spines so quickly, or what they're actually made of. The discovery of a variable species poses challenges to amphibian taxonomists and field biologists, who have traditionally used skin texture and presence/absence of tubercles as important discrete traits in diagnosing and identifying species. The discovery illustrates the importance of describing the behavior of new species, and bolsters the argument for preserving amphibian habitats, says Krynak. "Amphibians are declining so rapidly that scientists are oftentimes describing new species from museum specimens because the animals have already gone extinct in the wild, and very recently."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @05:59AM
All taxonomy should be phylogenetic.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dare on Friday March 27 2015, @07:00AM
And it is, as a science. However, field biology isn't quite there yet. In the field you still mostly identify species by how they look.
There is a project to change this, however, as DNA sequencing becomes ever easier. There was a project (by these guys, http://www.barcodeoflife.org/ [barcodeoflife.org] , if I remember it correctly) to build a handheld scanner; you'd just give it a tiny tissue sample of whatever species you with to identify, like one you could swab with a q-tip or something, and it would identify the species for you based on its DNA.
(One of the bug researchers at the natural history museum I work at said that in 7-8 years when the device is introuduced and stable, he'd challenge it to a contest of beetle identification, and was willing to bet that he'd still identify more beetles. Could have been just boasting; I'm not a biologist so I wouldn't know.)
From bad to worse in
(Score: 5, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 27 2015, @09:39AM
I could also see that being quite useful in a Missouri bar to make sure the girl you're picking up on is not also your cousin.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Touché) by dublet on Friday March 27 2015, @01:20PM
You may mock but something like this exists for Icelandic people, though not based on DNA samples: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24304415 [bbc.com]
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 27 2015, @04:11PM
Also for Jews who may be carriers of Tay-Sachs disease [jewishgenetics.org]. But it's more fun to make fun of people from the Ozarks; plus, one branch of my family is from there so I'm allowed.
Besides nobody makes fun of Icelanders.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @12:07AM
why do we need to scan? abortion is there for a reasn
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Friday March 27 2015, @06:13AM
Tough to capture mid woge [wikia.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday March 27 2015, @08:34AM
Poses Problems for Taxonomists
Not to mention for taxidermists! Hold still, dammit!
(Score: 2) by nishi.b on Friday March 27 2015, @09:15AM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jimshatt on Friday March 27 2015, @09:15AM
Grow a spine and get on with your job, for science's sake.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 27 2015, @12:27PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by Jesus_666 on Friday March 27 2015, @06:29PM
Let's make a computer analogy: Imagine that you're dealing with a new processor you know little about. It implements the x86 instruction set and is perfectly compatible except for one thing: It boots into protected mode. This would trip you up, not because a processor boots into a mode with protected memory but because an x86 chip does so.
"Vertebrates can't change their skin texture" had, until now, seemed like a perfectly reasonable assumption. Now that this assumption has been disproven, the known difficulty of classifying amphibians in the field has increased. And that's noteworthy.
(I know you were most likely joking but you did get modded Interesting so I thought I'd spell it out.)
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 27 2015, @07:18PM
Octopuses and squid can do this and I don't hear anybody complaining.
And birds can fly. It would probably be noteworth if a frog was observed doing so.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday March 27 2015, @09:32PM
(Score: 1) by MostCynical on Friday March 27 2015, @10:34AM
Used to be easy - ugly ones were toads.
Turns out, they are all frogs.
(And none of them is a cursed prince)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Funny) by WizardFusion on Friday March 27 2015, @12:46PM
(And none of them is a cursed prince)
Are you sure, have you kissed them all.?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @01:39PM
I for one welcome our new frad (or was that "toog") over/underlords.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2015, @02:28PM
Another rerun of old news.