An orange-striped, yellow-speckled frog discovered in Malaysia has been determined to be a new species.
Recently, Malaysian herpetologist Juliana Senawi was puzzled over an unfamiliar frog she had live-caught in swampland on the Malay Peninsula.
She showed the frog to Chan Kin Onn, a fellow herpetologist pursuing his doctorate at the University of Kansas.
They wondered - was this striking frog with an appearance unlike others nearby in the central peninsula an unidentified species?
Poring over records to find out, the researchers saw that a comparable frog had been collected in the area 10 years earlier, but it was written off then as a species from an Indonesian island.
The distance and geography between the two habitats made them suspect their frog might have been formerly misidentified.
"The frog was originally confused with the Siberut Island Frog, which is a species that occurs on Siberut Island off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, due to their similar appearance in colour-pattern," Chan said.
"Despite their similarities, we had a strong suspicion that the frog from Malaysia wasn't the Siberut Island Frog," Chan said.
Extensive genetic analysis performed in the lab of Rafe Brown, curator of herpetology at KU's Biodiversity Institute, determined whether the Malaysian frog was genetically distinct from its doppelganger on Siberut Island.
"Sure enough, results from Rafe's genetic analysis showed that the frog from Peninsular Malaysia was genetically too distant from the Siberut Island Frog to be considered the same species, so we decided to describe it as a new species," said Chan.
"We decided to call it 'Hylarana centropeninsularis' because it's currently only known from central Peninsular Malaysia," he said.
The finding was published the journal Herpetologica.
