The Prince's Rainforests Project has just released a new online, interactive booklet that describes how rainforests are on the front line in the fight against climate change and explains how a new form of international collaboration could help to reduce tropical deforestation, with many benefits for developed and developing countries.
The book features beautiful photographs by Daniel Beltrá including a stunning shot of a crested forest toad, one of the thousand or so species of frog and toad that live in the Amazon basin. The booklet contains a forward by HRH The Prince of Wales, as well as eyewitness stories from internationally-recognised figures who have already endorsed the PRP proposals, including Sir David Attenborough, Chief Almir of the Suruí tribe and Jared Diamond.
One of the hottest frog stories buzzing on the Internet these days must surely be the sensational story of the discovery of a lost world inside the crater of Mount Bosavi, an extinct volcano on Papua New Guinea, in which scientists have found some 40 previously undiscovered species. As well as a headline-grabbing giant rat - we're talking BIG here, think the size of a cat - there is also a frog with fangs and a further fifteen other new frog species!
All promises to be revealed in Lost Land Of The Volcano on BBC1 at 9 o’clock tonight.
Remember the days when people used to smirk at Prince Charles and his "eccentric" ideas about helping the environment and his organic farming methods on his estates? Well, times have thankfully changed and he's been able to enlist some of the world's biggest stars including Frog Tees favourite Kermit the Frog, as well as his sons Princes William and Harry, in the making of an awareness video for his new Rainforests Project.
In one of the most dramatic frog rescue stories of recent years, 50 examples of the once common but now endangered 'mountain chicken' frogs from Montserrat (leptodactylus fallax) have been airlifted to safety and moved to several European zoos. It is hoped that the rescued frogs will breed in captivity in a bid to save them from extinction.
Whilst recent frog news has been doom laden with numerous species threatened by environmental changes and the deadly chytridiomycosis fungus, there is thankfully some very good news from Columbia buzzing through the Internet right now!
Nine frog species - including three poisonous varieties and three transparent-skinned glass frogs - were found in the mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien region near Colombia's border with Panama.
In a recent online round up of the weirdest animals of 2008 our friends the frogs came in first place with this scary looking hairy frog (Trichobatrachus robustus)! It actively breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of its toe pads when it is threatened...
There's a fascinating story in the Scientific American today by Adam Marcus which takes a closer look at just how the White's tree frog manages to hang on so well:
Biologist Jon Barnes of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who led the research, used an atomic force microscope (AFM), which can provide images on the scale of billionths of a meter, to scan the feet of White's tree frogs. To the naked eye, the frogs' toe pads appear patterned with flat-topped, hexagonal cells surrounded by grooves filled with mucus. On closer inspection, however, Barnes discovered that the tops were not flat at all but rather were covered by tightly packed "nanopillars," each with a small dimple in the end, which generate powerful friction against the surfaces they contact.
This extremely rare frog - Chiromantis samkosensis aka the Samkos bush frog - has green blood and turquoise-coloured bones and has been found in Cambodia's remote Cardamom Mountains by the international conservation organisation Fauna & Flora International (FFI).
If you're a student who wants to learn about frogs without harming them then check out the latest edition of The Digital Frog 2.5! Virtual frog dissection, anatomy and ecology - it's an amazing eco-option for schools and teachers!
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