As humans, we tend to
overlook the secondhand effects climate change that don’t directly impact our
daily lives. The Puerto Rican coqui frog
(Eleutherodactylus coqui) have, through climate change, decreased their body
size. Peter Narins and Sebastiaan Meenderink, a UCLA
biologist and researcher respectively, conducted a study to observe the effects
of climate change on these tropical frogs.
They concluded from their results that the coqui decreased their size in
an effort to adapt to the warmer climate and make their bodies more
metabolically efficient. This decrease
in body size was also found to alter the pitch of the male’s call. By changing the pitch of the call, aggressive
and advertisement calls are also affected, compromising territory defense and
reproductive success of the coqui. The
article suggests how precious the coqui are to the people of Puerto Rico and
upon further research, I discovered that the coqui is not only prized by the
people, but it has embedded itself into their culture. The male coqui begin calling at dusk and do
not stop until dawn. Their calls are
said to help lull the people to Puerto Rican people to sleep. The species gets their name from their calls,
the “CO” is said be aggressive call and the “QUI” is advertisement call to
attract the females.
Coqui’s are an arboreal species and
rather than laying their eggs in the water, they are laid on palm leaves. This characteristic allows the species to
distance itself from the water because the juveniles metamorphose within the
egg, instead of emerging as tadpoles.
Calling, as we have seen, is extremely important in the survival of
arboreal Anuran species. If the pitch of
the male’s calls has been changed, their effort to attract and reproduce could
be compromised, as the females may have not adapted to this change. The rising climate change is only going to
cause a further decrease in the size of the coqui and an alteration in their
call pitch. The change in pitch of the
coqui’s calls has been now documented through this study and can be applied to
further research on similar species that could possibly be affected by global
warming and the climate change.
1 comment:
I wonder if the females' preferences for pitch will also change as their body size decreases as well.
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