The frogs belong to the genus Fejeverya, all of which make their homes underground. This made them particularly hard to find even though they are a fairly common group of frogs, said Sonali Garg, who undertook this study – a six-year long field exploration – as a part of her doctoral research at the University of Delhi.
Research on frogs species in the Western Ghats has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade. Between the years 2006-’15, a total of 1,581 species of amphibians were described globally. Of these, 103 species were described from the Western Ghats region alone. In a span of 10 years, the number of amphibian species known in the Western Ghats has nearly doubled. Garg’s Ph.D. research previously found seven new species of night frogs, of which four were less than 14 mm in length. Garg’s mentor and supervisor, SD Biju, has discovered over 80 species of frogs so far, earning himself the nickname “frogman”.
Of the 40-odd species of frogs that belong to genus Fejerverya, only one was previously known to have a burrowing lifestyle – the Rufescent Burrowing Frog. This species was given the “Least Concern” conservation status category on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List – an inventory of the global conservation status of biological species – since it was considered to be abundantly distributed throughout the Western Ghats. Read more...
Research on frogs species in the Western Ghats has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade. Between the years 2006-’15, a total of 1,581 species of amphibians were described globally. Of these, 103 species were described from the Western Ghats region alone. In a span of 10 years, the number of amphibian species known in the Western Ghats has nearly doubled. Garg’s Ph.D. research previously found seven new species of night frogs, of which four were less than 14 mm in length. Garg’s mentor and supervisor, SD Biju, has discovered over 80 species of frogs so far, earning himself the nickname “frogman”.
Of the 40-odd species of frogs that belong to genus Fejerverya, only one was previously known to have a burrowing lifestyle – the Rufescent Burrowing Frog. This species was given the “Least Concern” conservation status category on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List – an inventory of the global conservation status of biological species – since it was considered to be abundantly distributed throughout the Western Ghats. Read more...