frog (family) of the day :)
I’ve decided I will start doing entries not just on individual frog species, but frog families!
The first edition to this will be the centrolenidae family! They are part of the hyloidea clade, and known by the common name “glass frogs”
Emerald glass frog (espadarana prosoblepon) - (Image source)
Taxonomy: There are two subfamilies and 12 genuses, meaning there are actually a lot of them. There is a common misconception that there are few, or even only one glass frog. They are often just listed in those little “Cool frog” articles as “the glass frog”, as if they aren’t a very big family.
The frog I’ve most often seen mistaken as “the” glass frog, the one and only, is hyalinobatrachium dianae, Diane’s bare-hearted glass frog, which was actually only discovered recently, in 2015.
Diane’s bare-hearted glass frog (hyalinobatrachium dianae) - (Image source)
The two subfamilies are called centroleninae and hyalinobatrachinae, with the former being a much larger group.
Location: Central America and South America. They are native to South America but their populations have spread.
Description: Most of them are green, though some are other colours. Each species has transparent and translucent skin, though where and how much varies. Most of them have very translucent stomachs with non or only slightly translucent skin otherwise, though some are more fully translucent.
Upper Amazon glass frog (Hyalinobatrachium munozorum) - (Image source)
They have big sticky toe pads, and climb in and often live in trees, but are not in the true tree frog family. They are really similar to true tree frogs in a lot of ways, including their body structure, with their long front limbs. In fact, they were originally classified in the hylidae family, but later moved.
They are all pretty small. The largest species grows up to 7 inches, but most are much, much smaller.
They have big round eyes. Their eyes face forward on their heads, which is one of the things that caused them to be moved from the hylidae family.
They live mostly in trees, but come down in mating seasons and congregate in rivers and streams. They lay their eggs on leaves. All species have young that go through the tadpole process. They live in tropical forests, their most preferred kind being cloud forest.
The frog genus hyloscirtus, which actually IS in the hylidae family, is the only other group of frogs that has species with transparent skin. This makes them mistakable for glass frogs and vice versa. They look similar in a good amount of other ways too. A major way of differentiating them, is their eyes tend to be smaller and are not forward facing.
