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posted by janrinok on Friday March 27 2015, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the kamouflaged-kermit dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jimshatt on Friday March 27 2015, @09:15AM

    by jimshatt (978) on Friday March 27 2015, @09:15AM (#163137) Journal
    Octopuses and squid can do this and I don't hear anybody complaining. Also, one of the article talks about the frog "growing" spines, but this is clearly not the case. No new tissue is made by the frog (as far as I can tell). So in the end it's just a case of "oh noes, one moment its leg was straight and now its bent so I can't tell if it's a straight-legged or a bent-legged frog!!!"

    Grow a spine and get on with your job, for science's sake.
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 27 2015, @12:27PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday March 27 2015, @12:27PM (#163165) Homepage
    Indeed, and where does "a variable species" come into things? If you judge species by appearance, then you should be an anthropologist. In the nineteenth century.
    --
    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

    by Jesus_666 (3044) on Friday March 27 2015, @06:29PM (#163269)
    The big surprise does not come from the fact that an animal can change the texture of its skin. It comes from the fact that a vertebrate can do so, which had previously not been observed.

    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

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday March 27 2015, @07:18PM (#163293) Journal

    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.