BISHOP MUSEUM ANNOUNCES DISCOVERY OF WORLD’S SMALLEST VERTEBRATE
HONOLULU — Bishop Museum announced today the discovery of the world’s smallest vertebrate – a frog from New Guinea called Paedophryne amauensis. This species is named in a paper published on 11 January in the on-line journal PLoS One by a research team that included Dr. Allen Allison, Vice President for Science at Bishop Museum. This paper also includes the naming of a slightly larger species, Paedophryne swiftorum, which was key to the discovery of this small group of frogs.
Said Dr. Allen Allison, “these frogs – which are slightly larger that a quarter of an inch long – are quite common but live in the leaf litter of rain forests and have escaped detection. Most frogs are easily detected by their calls, but the calls of these frogs are hard to distinguish from those of insects.” These frogs mostly call in the early morning and early evening.
The first living individuals of Paedophryne swiftorum were discovered by Michael Gründler, an undergraduate student from Cornell University who together with two other Cornell undergraduates, Eric Rittmeyer and Derrick Thompson, accompanied Dr. Allison on a field trip to the north coast of New Guinea. Dr. Allison is working with landowners of Kamiali Village to develop a field station to facilitate long-term ecological research student training and biodiversity conservation.
“The discovery of this frog”, said Dr. Allison, “is typical of what one can learn about the rain forests through development of field stations.” He added that “finding Paedophryne swiftorum – which was named after John Swift and his family in recognition for their support of the Kamiali Biological Station – was key to finding other frogs in this group which now includes six species.” Once the call of this species was known, details and recordings were shared with others and this has resulted in the discovery of additional species.
Bishop Museum holds the world’s largest collection of biological specimens from New Guinea. Under a succession of grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Museum has been conducting field survey expeditions to various remote regions of New Guinea, the world’s largest and highest tropical island.. These expeditions have turned up more than 130 new species of amphibians and reptiles, especially in the past two decades. Since 1982 Dr. Allison and his colleague Fred Kraus have named 70 new species of New Guinea frogs, lizards and snakes.
The island of New Guinea, located just north of Australia, is twice the size of California. It is estimated by Dr. Allison to have around 1400 species of amphibians and reptiles. This compares to around 600 species for the entire United States. Measured by the number of species, the biodiversity of New Guinea region rivals that of the Amazon Basin, an area nearly eight times larger.
The Kamiali Biological Station, which Bishop Museum is helping to develop, is run on a sustainable basis. Fees for use and access cover the operating costs and produce a small surplus that goes into a trust fund to meet village development needs. This helps to ensure the perpetual protection of more than 120,000 acres of rain forest and coral reefs, an area nearly four times larger than Maui’s Haleakala National Park. Kamiali is slated to become an important training ground for the development of a Papua New Guinea biological survey modeled after Bishop Museum’s highly successful Hawaii Biological Survey.
PHOTO: E. N. Rittmeyer et al. (2012)
About Bishop Museum
The Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop in memory of his wife Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha I. Today, the Museum is recognized as the principal museum of the Pacific, housing the world’s largest collection of Hawaiian and Pacific artifacts and natural history specimens. More than 340,000 people visit the Museum each year, including over 40,000 schoolchildren. For more information, please call (808) 847-3511 or visit www.bishopmuseum.org.
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