QUITO, ECUADOR — A frog that lives across more than 67,000 square kilometers of rainforest in western Ecuador and southern Colombia, calls loudly enough to be heard at night, and turns up readily whenever biologists go looking for it, spent more than a hundred years going by the wrong name.
Researchers led by Santiago Ron at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador traveled to London's Natural History Museum to re-examine amphibian specimens collected in Ecuador during the 1800s, in a project described by the publisher behind the study. Comparing those preserved animals against living populations in the Chocó region, the team found that frogs long labeled Pristimantis subsigillatus did not actually match the original type specimen of that species at all — they were something else entirely, and had been for decades.
Hiding in the Open
The newly recognized species, formally described in the journal ZooKeys as Pristimantis milpe, or the Milpe robber frog, is a nocturnal animal identified by its distinctive clicking call, with females showing a flash of orange or pale blue coloring on the groin and thighs. Unlike many newly described amphibians, which tend to be rare or confined to a single valley, P. milpe ranges from sea level up to 1,200 meters in elevation and is, by rainforest standards, common — which is precisely what makes the century-long mix-up notable.
That such a common species has gone unnoticed under the wrong name for decades highlights the importance of correctly connecting scientific names with living populations in nature.
Jhael Ortega, study co-author
The mix-up illustrates a quieter problem in tropical biology, detailed further in a summary of the findings: taxonomic identity can lag behind field familiarity for a very long time, even for species that are neither hidden nor hard to find, simply because nobody rechecks the paperwork against museum type specimens. With Ecuador and Colombia's Chocó forests under continued pressure from logging and agriculture, the researchers say correcting the record matters for tracking which species are genuinely declining — and which have merely been miscounted under someone else's name.
