Identifying a Smallish Frog

[Bottlestein]

I've seen it now in many parts of Central Iowa (USA; Iowa is a pretty obscure state, so just in case).

It seems to be near all of the tributaries of the Des Moines River, which covers a large part of Central Iowa. It is greenish black of top. The size is ~5 cm for all the ones I've seen (around 20 individuals). I have not seen any that are longer than 10cm. These look like you'd expect an adult frog to look like, i.e they're definitely not tadpoles. Other than that, I obviously do not know if these are adults or adolescents. They are always spread apart from each other; I have not seen any within at least 2 meters of another individual. They can jump about 3 times their own length, or ~15 cm. However, I've never gone really close to them, so I have no idea if they can do much better when seriously threatened. They seem to only come out around dusk or later, in the summer. I do not know if they eat crickets, but all of the ones I saw where very close to large collections of crickets. The frogs don't seem to make a very loud croak, though some of them make some sort of noise if they jump away from you. I have not seen any mating, so I don't know what their mating call/scent/display is.

A word on the measurements: Somebody had chucked a Gatorade bottle near my lawn yesterday, and the frog was sitting next to it. This was when I saw roughly the size of the frog and the size of its leap relative to the bottle, and how I now have the "numbers". Obviously, since all the previous sightings are from memory, the measurements should be treated as very, very rough.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Do they have any kind of spots on their backs, and do you hear them calling at all?

I assume also that that length is from snout to groin?

[Bottlestein]

^ I've only seen them at night, so that said:

They have some darker patches on their back (i.e. more towards black than green). I can't say if each patch is one spot, or a collection of spots viewed from afar. The patches are not noticeably darker than their surroundings, however. The patches are uniform over their back, their snout and "eye cover" are slightly less green.

The length is indeed from snout to groin. However, take the length estimates with the caveat I gave in the OP - only one individual has been "sized" - that too not the frog itself, but what was near the frog. All other lengths are as remembered by something six and a half feet above the ground, and looking at a few centimeters long green frog, in grass, at night....

[Bottlestein]

Also, I don't know if this helps (I have no idea how "local" the frog populations get), but for what its worth:

Sighted near Squaw Creek, Ames; Iowa : 15 individuals including the one that was "sized" (in 4 days)

Sighted near Bjorkboda Marsh, Hamilton County; Iowa : 3 individuals (in 1 day)

Sighted near Johnston (suburb of Des Moines); Iowa) : 2, but cannot be sure it wasn't the same individual seen again (in 1 day)

Also, the Squaw Creek connects to the Bjorkboda Marsh, AFAIK. Near Johnston is the Cross Creek, which connects, I think to the Racoon River, which connects to the Des Moines River, which connects to the Mississippi etc.

As far as calls, they definitely don't make the canonical "ribbit". Its a much softer croak, and at the end of it there is a bit of a higher pitched "squawk", which you can hear above the crickets. In Ames, if you're walking back from the university to where I live, there's a lot of crickets chirping - it's actually really noisy. If you are close to the frog - about 1.5 feet away, you can hear the squawk above the racket and see it jump away. Johnston has fewer crickets, and we actually heard it croak, but again that was when we were about a foot away. All of them were seen after dusk, the earliest might be after 9:00 pm, the latest around 2:30 am.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Probably Northern Leopard Frogs, Lithobates pipiens.

They are easy to catch, you just need a headlamp at night, and a butterfly net. If you can manage that, take a photo and I can tell you for sure.

[Bottlestein]

^ They don't release anything serious in the way of allergens/toxins, do they?

[Anguirus]

^ Aly can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you are more toxic to it (the products we tend to put on our hands are bad news for amphibians, who have thin porous skin) than it is to you. Follow standard precautions (don't touch it then put your hand in your mouth).

Also, MY lab calls them Rana pipiens.

[Alyrium Denryle]

^ Aly can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you are more toxic to it (the products we tend to put on our hands are bad news for amphibians, who have thin porous skin) than it is to you. Follow standard precautions (don't touch it then put your hand in your mouth).

Also, MY lab calls them Rana pipiens.

I know you guys do. I am also well aware of the problems with Frost et al 2006 (etc) however, I will wait until you guys and Hillis fire your broadside before I change the naming convention back to Rana.

I am also more of a splitter and would like to see them all chopped up into Pantherana, Aquarana etc.

[Anguirus]

Not sure that there is in fact a (taxonomic) broadside in the works anytime soon. Pauly and Cannatella just submitted a paper critiquing Frost's conclusions about Bufo though.

I have some pretty major unresolved philosophical issues with the taxonomic rank of genus myself. It's a little unfortunate that binomial species names are so very useful that there's not really an acceptable alternative, but whatever clade is chosen as the genus (which is immortalized in the species name) is kind of arbitrary in my view. There's no way to get them to actually mean something equivalent between diverse taxa. (For instance, you can barely tell the different species in the genus Drosophila apart unless you are an expert, but there's ~1500 species in it and the taxon is millions of years old.) Might as well just stick with what people use unless you totally blow it apart by proving it is paraphyletic or polyphyletic.

(For the layperson: "Monophyletic" is a word that describes a taxon that includes an ancestor and all of its descendants. All scientifically recognized taxa SHOULD be monophyletic. A paraphyletic taxon fails to include all descendants of one common ancestor, and a polyphyletic one includes two or more groups yet fails to include their common ancestor. If a named taxon is found to be para- or polyphyletic, it is targeted for revision.)

[Bottlestein]

^ What is the "cladistic definition" of genus? Is genus more poorly defined than "family"? The only time I had to make any sort of cladistic diagram was in an undergrad bio class, so I don't remember the definitions of genus, order, family, etc. I remember the standard "fertile offspring" definition of species, but not of the other sets.

[LionElJonson]

I'm not an expert, but IIRC Clade refers to "everything descended from a common ancestor", while Genus is the Homo in Homo Sapiens.

[Anguirus]

There is NO formal definition of any taxonomic rank...except for species which there are tons of competing definitions.

All that a rank tells you is that 1) this group is a clade, meaning that it is monophyletic (or it SHOULD be anyway) 2) which groups are nested within each other groups. A genus cannot contain a family, it must be nested within a family.

The order goes:
Kingdom
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

As noted, genus and species form the binomial name by which all species are referred to.

The problem should be immediately obvious: we will often want to talk about clades that fit in between the ranks. (I.e. each species is in MANY more than six clades.) This has led to a proliferation of ranks, from subclass to infraorder to clan to subgenus.

It's also led to a movement towards rankless classification, which has made significant headway. Even the ICZN, the arbiters of the "old" style of animal classification (as opposed to the rankless PhyloCode) no longer officially recognizes ranks above that of "family."

[Anguirus]

BTW, pipiens behaving a bit oddly on some trees I've recently composed, so it's funny that it's come up in a thread here...

[Alyrium Denryle]

BTW, pipiens behaving a bit oddly on some trees I've recently composed, so it's funny that it's come up in a thread here...

What sort of odd are we talking here? You can send it via PM or Email if you dont want it in public?

As for rankless phylogeny... mmm Phylocode. I would LOVE to be able to just refer to clade names. It would be nice.

[Bottlestein]

Is the phylocode classification for every living thing, or within a kingdom? I imagine it's a string with some type of clade - subclade marker. So, for instance, do all living things start with the same number? Do all animals start with the same number? Also, if it's for all living things, then do we know what the common ancestor of Archaebacteria and Eubacteria was?

[Anguirus]

^ It's not a system of numbers, it is a verbal system just like the traditional one. In fact, it's designed to be as much like the traditional one as possible (when new names for clades are proposed now people often try to get them legitimized under both systems). It also does not regulate species names, as no one could agree on how to do that.

Also, if it's for all living things, then do we know what the common ancestor of Archaebacteria and Eubacteria was?

No system can name specimens that don't exist. We can tell you some things that must be true about the common ancestor, but we'll never be able to describe it (in the same fashion as living taxa and fossils can be described).

BTW, those clades are more often (and less misleadingly IMO) referred to as Archaea and Bacteria. We are in Eukarya, which forms a clade with Archaea.

[Bottlestein]

^ Would this common ancestor be something like a mitochondrion, then? Would it even undergo respiration (Kreb's cycle etc), or would that require too many complex enzymes?

[Darth Fanboy]

Either frog look like these? These were photographed in Central Iowa (near Alexander) a couple of years ago.

[Darth Fanboy]

The order goes:
Kingdom
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

Don't you count Domain and Phyla? D,K,P,C,O,F,G,S

Or as I remembered it back in the day, Donkey Kong Prophylactic Company Offers For Great Sex

[Alyrium Denryle]

Of course, you also have this:



Lots of variation in color BTW

[Darth Fanboy]

I think these were the guys who were being found with excess limbs and deformities in Minnesota swamps a decade ago and there were still a few people that thought Jesus had more to do with it than the fact that the water as polluted as fuck.

[Anguirus]

DAMMIT, I forgot phylum! And that's one of my favorites too!

I didn't forget domain. Domain and kingdom aren't incompatible by definition, but they've never been used as part of the same system. Probably because the historical kingdoms Monera and Protista are horrible groupings with no biological meaning whatever.

^ Would this common ancestor be something like a mitochondrion, then? Would it even undergo respiration (Kreb's cycle etc), or would that require too many complex enzymes?

No way. No free O2 yet. So no cellular respiration.

We know that it (the most recent common ancestor of life on Earth) had a lot of the same genes that we have today (the ones we share with EVERYTHING), that is, cell membrane, ribosomes, many of the really important enzymes. In fact, the genetic evidence AFAIK has sealed the case that there IS an MRCA of all life on Earth (the alternative, of course, would be multiple origins).

[Bottlestein]

^ So our cells absorbed mitochondria much later, then? Before O2, what was the electron acceptor for metabolism? is there anything that electronegative, or was it simply that the organism used a lot less energy in its regular functioning? I thought that transcribing genes was a very endotherminc process.

[Alyrium Denryle]

^ So our cells absorbed mitochondria much later, then? Before O2, what was the electron acceptor for metabolism? is there anything that electronegative, or was it simply that the organism used a lot less energy in its regular functioning? I thought that transcribing genes was a very endotherminc process.

Mitochondria were absorbed later yes, a symbiote that was eventually fully incorporated. There are a lot of organisms that are anaerobes that simply ferment sugars or use sulfur compounds as an electron acceptor.

[Anguirus]

^ These aren't "our" cells yet, really. Somewhere along the line, proto-eukaryotes absorbed primitive aerobic bacteria, and that's why our cells today have mitochondria.

Look up anaerobic bacteria, there are tons of other ways to fuel metabolism. I believe H2S metabolism was very popular back then (and it's still very common today).