Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News
When a group of biologists realized that pumpkin toadlets had no middle ear bone, the team was stumped.
That meant that these tiny, toxic frogs couldn’t hear each other’s high-pitched chirps, which is how most frogs attract mates.“We scratched our heads about how they could communicate by other means,” says Sandra Goutte, an evolutionary biologist at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Suspecting that the frogs use a less obvious form of communication, similar to parrots attracting mates with feathers that emanate ultraviolet light (SN:1/19/02, p. 40), the researchers aimed a UV lamp at the frogs’ neon orange skin and saw a pattern glowing in blue.
“I couldn’t stop smiling for the whole day” after discovering that the frogs had glowing bony plates just…
The post Tiny pumpkin toadlets have glowing bony plates on their backs appeared first on FeedBox.