Scientists discovered many new species in 2022, and 20 new frog species is quite a number. There’s probably a lot more out there, waiting to be discovered.
that details these findings. “Putting a name on a species allows us to collect data about it, cataloging just how much diversity there is.”
On the one hand, carrying out fieldwork in many of the island’s remote and inaccessible areas is tricky, making it that much more difficult to track down Malagasy frogs in the wild. “Madagascar is the fourth-poorest country in the world, and the fourth-largest island in the world,” Scherz says. “You're talking about massive tracts of land that have extremely poor accessibility levels.”
Then, that genetic data is mixed and matched with other information from over 1300 frogs: pictures of what they looked like in the field, what they look like now, recordings of what they sound like, their measurements, where they live, what they have been observed behaving like, and so forth.As a result, the international team of researchers have been able to identify 20 additional species, though they might all look similar to the untrained eye.
It’s an exceptional example of how quickly our understanding of the natural diversity of life is expanding, says, a curator emeritus of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved in this research.