Episode 270: The Tapir Frog
b'New frog just dropped.\\n\\nHappy birthday to Finn and Oran this week! Have a great birthday, both of you!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nFrog with tapir-like nose found in Amazon rainforest, thanks to its "beeping" call\\n\\nMeet the tapir frog:\\n\\n \\n\\nLooks kind of like the South American tapir, but frog:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we have a short episode about the recent discovery of a mystery frog in Peru--but first, we have TWO birthday shout-outs! That\\u2019s twice the fun!\\n\\nHappy birthday to both Finn and Oran! I hope your birthdays are amazing! Maybe you should each have two birthday parties, one for yourself and one for the other, even though you don\\u2019t know each other and your birthdays are actually on different days.\\n\\nPeru is a country in western South America, and it\\u2019s home to the Amazon Basin rainforest and many other habitats. Frogs are common throughout the Amazon, naturally, since there\\u2019s a whole lot of water and rain, and it\\u2019s warm all the time. One particular genus of frog, Synapturanus, is especially widespread but is hard to find because it spends most of its time underground.\\n\\nA team of scientists researching the Amazon\\u2019s diversity of animals and plants, especially those organisms that are mostly hidden for various reasons, heard about a particular Synapturanus frog known to the people of the area. The frog is nocturnal and lives underground in burrows it digs in the Amazon peatlands.\\n\\nPeat is wet soil made up mostly of partially decayed vegetation. It\\u2019s the first step in the formation of coal beds, but the coal takes millions of years to form whereas peat only take thousands of years to form. Peatlands are really important to the ecological health of the entire earth, because they store so much carbon and absorb so much water.\\n\\nThe scientists knew from locals that this particular frog existed. The next step was to actually find it so they could learn more about it. A small team of scientists from Peru and other countries traveled to the area, and local guides took them to sites where the frog was supposed to live.\\n\\nBecause the frog is nocturnal, they had to go at night to find it. But because the frog also spends most of its time underground, they couldn\\u2019t just walk around shining flashlights on frog-shaped things in hopes of finding a new species of frog. Instead, they had to listen.\\n\\nMany new frog species are only discovered after a frog expert hears a call they don\\u2019t recognize. That was the case for this frog. The male makes a loud beeping noise, especially after rain. Whenever one of the scientists heard one, they\\u2019d immediately drop to the ground and start digging with their hands. I can\\u2019t even imagine how muddy they must have gotten.\\n\\nIt was around 2am on the last night of the search when their digging paid off. A little brown frog hopped out of its disturbed burrow and all the scientists scrambled around in an excited panic to catch it carefully before it got away.\\n\\nThis is what the frog sounds like:\\n\\n[tapir frog beeping]\\n\\nThe locals call the frog rana danta, which means tapir frog. The tapir, as you may remember from episodes 18 and 245, among others, is a sort of pig-shaped animal with a short trunk-like snoot called a proboscis. It\\u2019s distantly related to rhinoceroses and horses. It uses its proboscis to gather plants and spends a lot of time underwater, and will even sink to the bottom of a pond or stream and walk across it on the bottom instead of swimming.\\n\\nThe tapir most common around the Amazon in Peru is the South American tapir. It\\u2019s dark brown in color with a tiny little stub of a tail and a shorter proboscis than other tapir species. Its proboscis looks less like a little trunk and more like a long pointy nose.\\n\\nThe tapir frog is chocolate brown in color, has no tail of course because it\\u2019s a frog, and while it has a chonky body sort of life a tapir, its nose draws out to a blunt point.'