Most people don’t think of frogs as being good parents, but in fact amphibians have a wide diversity of reproductive strategies, including guarding their eggs.
Sheila Poo, from the Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Lab, just published her first paper entitled “The Adaptive Significance of Egg Attendance in a South-East Asian Tree Frog” in the journal Ethology. For the past three years, she has been closely observing the treefrog Chiromantis hansenae in Thailand to find out about its life history and the role of parental care in larval survival. Her study is the first to show that egg attendance by female C. hansenae plays a critical role in offspring survivorship.
To find out more, get the paper here!
Sheila is currently in the field again in Thailand, hard at work collecting even more data. Below is a short video with footage from her study site created by one of her field assistants, Adair McNear, giving a glimpse of what it is like working on these critters.
Congratulations Sheila, all the time you spent wading in ponds in the dark has paid off!
