A Collett's Tree Frog is Spotted by a Orangutan Researcher in Indonesia! - Observation of the Week, 10/11/20

Our Observation of the Week is this Collett's Tree Frog (Katak jam pasir in Bahasa), seen in Indonesia by @mahyana_salim!

Mahyana Salim credits her love of nature to an internship she took in college. “At that time I had the opportunity to do an internship at one of the research stations in the Leuser Ecosystem, namely the Soraya Research Station,” she explains. The station is managed by the Leuser Conservation Forum (FKL), a local NGO. The Leuser ecosystem is a forest in northern Sumatra and is incredibly biodiverse. It contains an especially high number of mammal species, and is the last refuge of some species such as the Sumatran Rhino and the Sumatran Elephant.

While there, Mahyana says

I encountered things that I had never expected -heard birds singing, saw large trees, saw orangutans, felt the cold edge of a waterfall there, somehow I found peace there. I unconsciously started falling in love with nature. That was my best reason to return a year later to do my final project research there on the Sumatran orangutan population there. Until now, I am still interested in continuing research on Sumatran orangutans in that location as my thesis research.

While following a research transect on Sumatra, Mahyana and her team stumbled across the frog documented in this observation. “[We] tried to document it because this was the first time I saw a frog with a unique pattern similar to the letter X on its back,” she says, and now it’s been identified as Polypedates colletii.

Collett’s Tree Frog occurs in southeast Asia, both on the mainland and on islands like Sumatra and Borneo. It’s mainly arboreal and notably has quite a pointy (aka acute) snout. Like other members of its family (Rhacophoridae), eggs are laid in a mass of foam over water, which dries and hardens. When the eggs hatch, the tadpoles drop into the water below. While listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, habitat loss is a potential threat to this species.

Mahyana (above) joined iNaturalist less than two weeks ago, and has added thirteen observations so far. She says, “I use iNaturalist because this website is one of the websites that can be accessed easily by every single person around the world to get information about biodiversity. In addition, this website also provides a facility to discuss the identification of a particular species. I became more interested in observing the species around me and sharing them.”

Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

- These members of the African frog genus Chiromantis, also in the family Rhacophoridae, create a foam nest. Not all nests in the family are made by more than two frogs.

- The genus Polypedates has a common name of “whipping frogs”, but I couldn’t find an explanation for that name. Anyone know where it comes from?

Posted on October 11, 2020 09:46 PM by