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Capturing Endangered Frog’s Song | Short Film Showcase


4m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] This is a real chance to use sound to save species from extinction. A lot of these frogs that we're working with are endangered. They need our support, and sound can be a tool for conservation. The frog that we are looking for is called Electro Hollow Exquisite Ax, the exquisite spike frog, and it is a species endemic to this location in Cazuca National Park. It is critically endangered and found nowhere else in the world.

We are building a frog rescue center to breed these animals in captivity and reintroduce them. The problem is that in order to effectively conserve this frog, we really need to understand the behavior, the natural history, what do they eat, and what do they sound like. We really know very little about any of this. In captive breeding situations, calls and sounds of the environment are critical to success. The males especially rely on calls in order to help simulate breeding behavior. But not just the calls; we want sounds of water rushing, we want sounds of wind in the trees, and things like that to help artificially immerse these animals in their environment and give them everything they need to be successful.

Our target, our pinus guy dream, is to get wild vocalizations of exquisite because they've never been heard before. We don't even know what the frog sounds like. If we do, I mean, it doesn't get better than that; you're contributing to the historical record. You are building knowledge, and you're contributing to conservation. We know that some frogs don't make a call, but we also do know that Exquisite Ax can make sound. There are some instances where we have captured an Exquisite Ax in order to check its health, and it actually will chatter.

[Music] That opens the possibility that we just haven't been able to record it yet. [Music] Recording on a river is really difficult; there's no way around it. You have to navigate the sounds of rushing water. Usually, you can use a landscape to mitigate geological background sound, but in this circumstance, we are right in the middle of it. These frogs like rushing water.

One thing we had was that Exquisite Ax was vocalizing at a different time of day that we had never surveyed before. So, he got up at all hours of the night and all hours of the day and went into the rivers in the forest to listen and record. That was really exciting because what we found out was that they're not doing what we thought—they're doing it in broad daylight in the afternoon. I found three adult Exquisite Ax in one small pool below a tiny cascade in the river, all active and swimming and walking on the bottom. I mean, these are frogs that live high up in the canopy. It's one of the highest canopy frogs that live in this forest. So, the last place we would have ever expected to look for a frog would be underwater, let alone during the day for a nocturnal species.

Another possible hypothesis was that we were already hearing Exquisite Ax, and we said no. But we captured all the sounds we could in our fieldwork and lined them up to do spectrographic analysis. From what we can see, they're not acoustically distinct enough to indicate a different species. However, there's one interesting idea that still has a lot of possibility to it, and it's that these frogs are singing through a different medium—not using the air; they're using the water. This is really interesting because we have rarely ever seen any frogs that live in the trees staying in the water, except for this species.

If these frogs are so comfortable underwater, maybe one of the reasons we haven't heard of it yet is because they vocalize underwater. That would certainly give them an evolutionary advantage. There's a lot of acoustic competition in the water. To investigate whether or not Exquisite Ax was calling in the water, we deployed a whole series of hydrophones and listened for hours and hours and hours in many different locations.

One of the most exciting outcomes of this project is the recording of a sound underwater that we cannot explain right now. "Oh, just her gait, and again! Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, whatever this is, it's very interesting." There was a consistent pattern repeated seven or eight times every minute or so. It was really interesting. If it's biological, the only way we can really confirm that is if we find it somewhere else.

That sounds interesting: "Oh, could look at that! I asked—oh, he the reprinting. Very future. Veneto lol Umbro e electricity. Oh poor, poor area." "Del agua, del agua, the soleus de bajo el agua la huasteca." Everyone, and once it left the water and ascended the tripod, the noise stopped. "And look at this; that looks pretty, yeah, it's quite beautiful. I'm going to feel like also, yeah—how perfect, the spacing is. It really says something that this is most likely biological, although we need to invest a lot more research to figure out exactly what it is."

Already, the puzzle pieces are starting to fit together and really suggest that Exquisite Ax might in fact be calling underwater. We've recorded the vocalizations of several endangered frog species here in the park, and I'm really excited to have contributed to that effort. Recording any kind of behavior is really helpful to conservation; that helps us to know what they need and what we can provide for them in order to help save them.

Looking in places at times for things that you don't expect often can produce really exciting results. We had only read the books and all the literature and used those to decide when to go out looking for things. We would have not found nearly as much as me to discover this expedition. "La casita la raza push que son ran endemic adel parque nacional Kazuko, Paraguay. No, para que no, no voy a la Ossa adam in mere hours aparecer. Nieto, Anita motoneuron on staff on a natural Asia, little murky area, podemos aprender algo. The river so splash the anomalies."

[Music] You [Music]

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