For The Love Of Frogs

Two new research tools are supporting a groundswell of public interest that could make a difference to the future of Australian frogs, which are facing tough times.

- Karen McGhee

IF YOU’RE HOPING to be involved in the discovery of a new vertebrate species, then Australian frogs could be your best chance.So far, Australia has a confirmed 246 species and subspecies of frog. But there may be several dozen more out there still waiting to be identified, says Dr Jodi Rowley, the Australian Museum’s curator of amphibian and reptile conservation biology.

“We think that anywhere up to about 20 per cent of our frog species still remain to be discovered,” she explains, “and, potentially, anyone out there could find them.”

Along with the museum’s director, Kim McKay, Jodi is the driving force behind what’s become one of Australia’s most successful citizen science projects – FrogID. At its core is an interactive app, downloadable for free on a smartphone, that exploits the fact that every frog species has its own unique call. Each amphibian ribbit, chirp, tweet, croak or pobblebonk that emerges across Australia after rain is able to be so precisely linked to the species that produces it that Kim refers to frog calls as “audio DNA”. The app can record these telltale sounds, document exactly where they occur, send the information to the museum to be logged and return a response to the user identifying the species responsible.

OF COURSE, if you’re hoping for a new discovery, what you’ll want to receive back is “unidentified frog”, which could indicate you’re onto a creature never before documented by science. That hasn’t happened…yet. But almost as exciting is when the reply is something like, “Wow! Haven’t heard that one from your area before!” That’s what happened recently to Andrew Spiers, who lives near Darwin and has been using the app now for almost a year. “I thought we had Crinia bilingua