A team of herpetologists from Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), together with colleagues from Russia and Bangladesh, led by Nikolai Poyarkov of the MSU Biology Department, has found and described a new species of frog for science, the thin-armed garlic frog Leptobrachium sylheticum, according to the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) website.

"Molecular genetic methods confirm that the find does not resemble any of the known species, and that there are enough differences in the genome to recognize the captured garlic frog as a new species," the report says.

According to study leader Nikolai Poyarkov, there are 38 known Leptobrachium species worldwide, inhabiting southern China, Indochina, Myanmar, eastern India, the Greater Sunda Islands and the Philippines.

"We have been studying these frogs for a long time, and in an article in 2018, we found out that there is a distinct group of species among them that inhabit western Indochina and Myanmar. And then, in 2018, I downloaded DNA sequences of Leptobrachium rakhinense from Myanmar and border areas in eastern India obtained by other researchers for other projects from the Genbank database. To my surprise, it turned out that the samples from India and Myanmar do not form a monophyletic group on the evolutionary tree of the genus, that is, they are not closely related. It immediately became clear that some other species of Leptobrachium is found in and around northeastern India, and I started looking for ways to investigate it," he said of the beginning of the study.

Scientists say that the biodiversity of the tropics is now so great that it is hard to quantify. The herpetofauna of Southeast Asia's tropics, for example, is thought to include at least 1,000 amphibian and 1,500 reptile species. Over the past two decades an exponential growth of newly discovered species has been observed in this region. There are two reasons for this: firstly, the spread and availability of molecular genetic techniques has enabled similar looking species to be distinguished and, secondly, the number of wars and similar conflicts in the region has been substantially reduced since the 20th century and many areas have become accessible to researchers.

Made in Russia

Author: Karina Kamalova