A Peek Inside the Transparent Frog

There wouldn’t be a lot of advantages to being a member of the Hyalinobatrachium yaku species. You’d be a frog for one thing. You’d be just 0.8 in. (2 cm) long too, meaning you’d be prey for, well, just about anything that lives with you in the Ecuadorean Amazon. But if it was any consolation, you could at least be sure you’d be unlikely ever to need an MRI, X-ray or CT scan again. That’s because you’d be clear, as in transparent, as in wanna’-check-my-heart? Well, take a look. The newly designated species was discovered by a team of researchers led by ecologist and biologist Juan M. Guayasimin of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. From the start, they knew they’d have to do some very exacting work, but that there was reason to bother. There are other frogs in the Hyalinobatrachium genus, some of which have been observed in the wild and some of which have been preserved as museum specimens. They are all about the same size and most of them are at least partly transparent on the abdomen. But the very act of preserving the animals for collections causes some discoloration of the skin, so other markings—such as telltale spots and different shades of green and yellow—may be lost or become indistinct. Guayasimin and his colleagues thus reckoned that the rainforest could use one more going-over to determine if there were more species within the genus to be found. They surveyed 65-ft. (20 m) diameter ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Amazon Biology frog onetime Science Species Source Type: news