[adrotate banner=”7″]It sure wasn’t I, Dr. Mobusu! I swear it. Okay, maybe I “borrowed” the lungs for a bit. But my mutant venus flytrap needed them. Because it can breathe. Because it’s a mutant! That’s much more interesting than a rare frog that breaths through its skin. How does it sneeze? Answer that one! Even with a nose, you need air to come out of somewhere. I have the feeling the reason this frog is so rare is every time it steps out of the house some scientists grabs it and cuts it open. Maybe there’s a correlation? That’s why science should only be handled by those of us who are mad. Just to show up this frog I’m going to make a frog that SEES through its skin! Then I’ll make a fortune selling it full-body sunglasses. My future’s so bright I gotta wear shades…
Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScienceThe first lungless frog has been discovered lurking in the jungles of Borneo.
The enigmatic amphibian, dubbed Barbourula kalimantanensis , apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin.
Scientists first saw one of these frogs 30 years ago, but due to their rarity, just one other specimen had been collected since then and neither had been dissected.
“No one thought to open them up – there was no real reason to believe that they could be lungless,” said researcher David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. “Because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one specimen in your museum, you don’t want to rip it open!”
The amphibians, no more than 2 inches long, have proven elusive because they live in cold, fast rivers in remote areas of the rainforests of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Also, they are slippery “and can be surprisingly fast for short bursts,” Bickford said. “We had a team of 11 people looking for these frogs and it took us almost two weeks before we found any.”
He and his colleagues had no idea this frog would be lungless.
“I was just going to be happy if we simply rediscovered the frogs,” Bickford said. “It had been 30 years of intermittent searching for this frog until we could put together a multinational team and get to the last remaining areas where it could realistically be found.”