In the mountains of southern Brazil, researchers just announced a new species of pumpkin toadlet, a frog smaller than a Tic Tac. It glows like a traffic cone, lives in leaf litter, and somehow managed to avoid formal description until now. That feels like a fair metaphor for the state of science right now. The big stuff fights for headlines, while a one-centimeter frog does its thing undetected.
The toadlet, now named Brachycephalus lulai, lives more than 750 meters (2,460 feet) up in the Serra do Quiriri range in Santa Catarina. It belongs to the Brachycephalidae family, a group of miniature amphibians famous for being both adorable and evolutionarily stressed. Two close relatives live on nearby slopes, each confined to its own tiny patch of forest.
Researchers have been surveying these mountains for seven years, trying to figure out which orange frogs belong where. They finally located the new pumpkin toadlet species by tracking the males’ mating calls. Females, less vocal and harder to spot, were collected “haphazardly.”
In the lab, the team sequenced DNA and compared physical traits, eventually confirming they weren’t dealing with a variation of a known frog but a species with its own lineage. They named it after Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, hoping to push for more conservation support toward the Atlantic rainforest and the amphibians clinging to what’s left of it.
The study, published in PLOS One, notes that B. lulai lives in a relatively intact patch of forest, which puts it in the “least concern” category for now. That’s the polite scientific way of saying this pumpkin toadlet isn’t collapsing, but everything around it absolutely could. Other species in Santa Catarina have been hammered by grazing, grassland burning, invasive plants, tourism, mining, and the steady grind of deforestation. Amphibians as a whole are still the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet.
Brazil is now discussing a federal conservation unit in the region, one that wouldn’t require buying out private land. Bornschein and colleagues point out that fieldwork there is brutal—long hikes, dense forest, few resources—but much-needed. Many of these frogs live on mountaintops the size of small neighborhoods. If researchers miss them, no one will know they ever existed.
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