Noam Chomsky frog. Resistance-against-mining-corporation frog. J.R.R. Tolkien frog.
Always something fun going on with newly-recorded frog species in the tropical Andes.
Especially within the political borders of Ecuador and Colombia, the tropical Andes are the site of the highest local biodiversity of mammals, birds, amphibians, and plants on the planet.
For example, Colombia is home to over 730 unique species of frogs and is home to 20% of all bird species on the planet.
Saw the news, from January 2023, about the newly-described “Tolkien frog”.
And just a year prior, in 2022, there was the “resistance frog.”
The official common name: “rana cohete resistencia de Intag” or, roughly, “Intag’s resistance frog.”
This creature, an endemic species, lives in forest where the local Intag community/communities have for the past 30 years consistently fought against corporate mining company attempts to build copper mining infrastructure, hence the frog’s name which honors this tradition of resistance.
And then in 2019, there were a whole bunch of newly-described rain frog species also detected in Ecuador.
In this published article introducing the frogs, the researchers note the intense and “extraordinary” biodiversity even within the same species.
For example, although 11 frog species were newly described, here’s a look at the color/pattern diversity within just one single species, Pristimantis multicolor.
Another of the new species was named Pristimantis chomskyi, after Noam Chomsky:
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