North Queensland wildlife and the environment
We should be seeing more frogs as the Wet season approaches and it would be good to make them feel at home. Here’s one beautiful way of doing just that.
It is not my creation nor even my photo but came to me via facebook. It was too good not to share and I thank Scott for giving me permission to post it.
A couple of days ago my system informed me that, “A new comment on the post Green Tree Frogs – not always green is waiting for your approval.” Readers come up with some fascinating observations so I clicked through straight away. Here’s the email conversation which followed, complete except for the usual greetings, etc.
Yvette: Hi Malcolm,
I live in Darwin NT and have many green tree frogs in the garden. I hunt and catch cane toads every night and came across a black tree frog. I’ve seen many dark green but never black. Have you heard of black tree frogs before? I have a photo of it next to a green one which I’m happy to email to you if you wish.
Malcolm: Black? New to me! I would love to see a photo.
I don’t know how many frogs we have in our garden but we have seen this one a few times in the last week. He (she?) is a Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea, and is a very large member of the species. Wikipedia reckons they reach 10cm and he was at least that big – he is resting on large adult male hands here. I will measure him next time I see him.*
Yesterday I discovered him enjoying the cool water in the bottom of our old concrete laundry tub and hauled him out to take a photo on the way to a safer place. As I noted a while ago, they adapt their colour to their surroundings and this one had spent hours trying to look grey-brown. He didn’t manage to change as much as this virtuoso, however.
Handling frogs is not generally recommended because salt, oils and traces of other chemicals on our skin can be passed on to them and harm their health. Their damp, delicate skin is easily damaged by rough handling, too. Washing our hands in clean water and handling the frog immediately after – with our hands still wet, as seen below – is best for them.
* We measured him the same evening: 11.5 cm. Wikipedia is wrong!!
We have quite a number of Green Tree Frogs, Litoria caerulea, in our garden but they don’t live where their name would suggest they live. The species has adapted very happily to suburban life and they sit every evening on windowsills outside lighted rooms, feasting on insects attracted to the lights; or they come indoors like this one; or they catch some warmth on the edge of the birdbath; and so on. Around this time of year they get pathetically optimistic about breeding opportunities (never mind that it hasn’t rained for months!) and call out in response to lawnmowers, dogs barking next door, motorbikes, aeroplanes and anything else that makes a baritone grawwrk!, so we know there’s one in the laundry tub drain pipe, too.
But they can still surprise us.
A couple of days ago we spotted a shiny dark – something – in the cement-brick base of a garden seat. It turned out to be the nose of a frog, and he had a neighbour in the adjoining brick. The holes were barely wide enough for me to fit my thumb through and the frogs were well grown – even their noses looked too big to fit through the holes, let alone their bodies. There were no other ways in or out so we decided they must have got in there when younger and survived ever since on passing ants.
To the rescue!
Green Tree Frogs? They certainly weren’t green, but we weren’t surprised since we know they change colour to match their surroundings. The darkest I have seen were in Reef HQ Aquarium; I showed one here with a more normal one for comparison.
They were also not keen to escape. In fact, we needed a hose and quite some time to persuade them to hop out. Then we patted ourselves on the back for our kindness towards dumb animals, put the seat back together and went on with the rest of our lives.
Next day we were out there again but when we looked at the bricks we had to laugh at ourselves and marvel at frogs’ ability to squeeze through tiny gaps: two dark shiny noses poked up out of their holes. So much for our rescue!
Reef HQ Aquarium has carried out some major projects recently. Some of them are still under way but I am happy to report the completion of the Rainforest Tree exhibit:
One might ask why an aquarium celebrating the Great Barrier Reef should need a rainforest exhibit but the answer is fairly simple: the rainforest is all part of the same ecosystem, intimately linked through the water cycle. Rains fall on the hills, and the water drains through the rainforest, farmlands and mangroves to the coastal waters of the GBR lagoon. What happens to it on the way – picking up sediments and nutrients, for instance – has immediate effects on the seagrass and corals, and on everything that lives on and amongst them. The aquarium has a lovely freshwater wetlands exhibit next to the tree with a mangrove exhibit not too far away to complete the sequence.
The three glass-fronted display cases contain (left to right) Green Tree Frogs, a Green Python and Red-eyed Tree Frogs. I have already posted a picture of the first of these – here – so here are the other two:
Something funny about its eye? Read about the nictitating membrane.
The Green Tree Python is a beautiful creature and has pride of place in the exhibit. She isn’t as thrilled by that as the aquarium’s visitors are by her, being nocturnal by nature. However, she does often sleep where people can see her.
