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New frog species show how geology shapes Amazon’s biodiversity

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The frog’s loud croaking turned out to be a call to its own demise. The researchers walking along the steep muddy bank on a rainy November day in 2022 in the Imeri Range on the Brazil-Venezuela border were alerted by the unfamiliar sound. They found the frog sitting outside the opening to a tarantula’s burrow and captured it. They later named the frog Neblinaphryne imeri. “That was the most difficult expedition I’ve ever been on in my entire life,” says Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues, a herpetologist at the University of São Paulo (USP). Rodrigues has been doing fieldwork for more than 40 years, and this time he was leading a team of 14 researchers on a 12-day camping expedition at the top of a nearly 1,900-meter (6,200-foot) peak. Even the region’s Indigenous Yanomami don’t climb to the Imeri peak because of the treacherous route and the fact that there are no large mammals to be hunted at that altitude. Rodrigues’s team only managed to reach the spot with a Brazilian military helicopter. This was the second time Rodrigues had led an expedition of researchers, with the help of the military, in this part of Brazil’s Amazonas state. The first was to the Neblina peak in 2017, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Imeri. Both mountains are located inside protected areas: Pico da Neblina National Park and the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, respectively. The Neblina expedition also resulted in the discovery of a previously undescribed frog species, which they named Neblinaphryne mayeri after…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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