Gadagkar, Raghavendra

English

Publications of the IAS Fellows

RESEARCH NEWS 
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 86, NO. 1, 10 JANUARY 2004 15
Next time we hear a frog croak, let’s say thank you! 
Raghavendra Gadagkar 
Not many of us would count frogs 
among the animals we love. Frogs do not 
figure anywhere near the top of the list 
even among animal lovers and conserva-
tion biologists. The phrase one often hears 
among conservationists is ‘charismatic 
mega-fauna’, and they tell us that these 
are easy to sell in conservation public 
relations. It is true that you cannot really 
hug and cuddle a frog and yet a frog has 
just put India prominently on the world 
map. The discovery of a unique frog being 
variously dubbed as the Jurassic frog, 
pig-nosed frog and the coelocanth of 
frogs, from the Western Ghats is justifia-
bly causing ripples across the disciplines 
of biodiversity, vertebrate phylogeny and 
biogeography. Writing in a recent issue 
of Nature1, S. D. Biju of the Tropical 
Botanical Garden and Research Institute, 
Thiruvananthapuram and Franky Bossuyt 
f the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bel-
gium, describe their discovery and point 
out why they have not only had to assign 
this frog to a new species but to a new 
genus and a new family as well. In a paral-
lel study published in this issue of Cur-
r nt Science, Sushil K. Dutta of Utkal 
Un versity, Bhubaneshwar, along with 
col eagues from the Wildlife Institute of 
India, Dehradun; Centre for Cellular and 
Molecular Biology, Hyderabad and Ashoka 
Trust for Research in Ecology and the 
Environment, Banglore has described 
the same frog using similar morphomet-
r c and molecular techniques and arrived 
at pretty much the same conclusions2. 
 Frogs belong to the vertebrate class 
Amphibia which evolved from lung 
fishes during the Devonian period (354–
417 million years ago) in geological 
history. The living amphibians comprise 
Anura (frogs and toads), Caudata (sal-
manders) and Gymnophiana (the caecili-
ans or limbless amphibians), of which 
frogs and toads are the most diverse and 
best known to scientists and laymen 
alike. Among the about 4800 species of 
Neobatrachia or advanced frogs, the 
most unusual known so far were some 
frogs from the archipelago of Seychelles, 
in the family Sooglossidae. The frog now 
discovered in the Western Ghats is also 
most unusual among the advanced frogs 
and its closest relatives seem to be the 
sooglossids from Seychelles. And yet, it 
is sufficiently different from its relatives 
in Seychelles, that it deserves a new fam-
ily for itself. This new family has been 
amed Nasikabatrachidae (Nasika, for 
‘nose’, incidentally). The frog itself has 
been given the fitting binomial name 
Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis. 
 
Recent reports indicate that there may be a vast number of undescribed species in areas such as the Western Ghats and 
Sri Lanka. Other unexplored areas such as the eastern Him laya and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are also likely 
to have many undescribed taxa. Of particular interest are high diversity groups such as the Rhacophorids or treefrogs, 
where taxonomic and phylogenetic issues are yet to be resolved. (Photo Credits: Saravana Kumar, Kartik Shanker) 
 
RESEARCH NEWS 
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 86, NO. 1, 10 JANUARY 2004 16 
 This discovery is significant at many 
different levels. It is significant for our 
understanding of amphibian evolution and 
phylogeny, as it concerns a frog that 
appears to have diverged from its closest 
known relatives (the Sooglossidae) more 
than 100 million years ago and of course 
had remained undocumented so far. More 
generally speaking, the discovery of a 
new family among vertebrates is a truly 
rare event. 
 The fact that the closest relatives of 
Nasikabatrachus are to be found in the 
Seychelles, is also a matter of great in-
terest. Reconstructing past histories of 
land masses and their fauna and flora is a 
tricky business. Not surprisingly, there 
are more models and theories than hard 
evidence. The discovery of Nasikabatra-
chus from the Western Ghats demystifies 
the restriction of Sooglossidae to the 
Seychelles, because it lends support to 
the idea that Sooglossidae and Nasika-
batrachidae (and many other groups) 
could have been isolated and could have 
diversified and evolved, first on the 
Madagascar–Seychelles–India land mass 
and later on the Seychelles–India land 
mass and crossed over to Eurasia after 
the collision of India with the Eurasian 
plates. Support for such an ‘out-of-India’ 
model is now accumulating as more and 
more endemic fauna, unrelated to Afri-
can and American lineages, are being 
discovered in India3. 
 It is now widely known that the West-
ern Ghats are an important hotspot of 
biodiversity and hold treasures that are 
vital to understanding the evolution of 
life on earth, not to mention the treasures 
they hold with potential for direct eco-
nomic and medicinal value. And yet, 
these fragile mountain ecosystems are 
under severe onslaught due to develop-
mental activities. Balancing the needs of 
ur growing population and the impera-
tive to safeguard 100million-year-old life 
forms that hold the key to the evolution 
of lif on earth will put us to a severe test 
indeed. 
 It is probably fair to ask why the  
Indian effort described in this issue of  
Current Science (page 211) appears 
months later than the effort that included 
a Belgian collaborator? Personally, I am 
not surprised at all. Instead, I am imp-
res ed that the India  naturalists and 
fi ld biologists at all managed to colla-
borate with molecular biologists and 
managed to get their paper so soon after 
th  Nature paper. In India, we have not 
really woken up to the reality that mo-
lecular techniques are becoming increas-
ingly powerful and essential for answer-
ing questions in ecology, behaviour and 
natural history. There is no dearth of 
expertise and facilities in molecular bio-
logy, but there is not a single institution 
where molecular techniques are routinely 
applied to problems of ecology and natu-
ral history. And yet, it is in these areas 
that we have a much greater chance of 
making truly novel and original contribu-
tions to global knowledge. Running a 
molecular biology lab is very demanding 
and addictive, and there is of course the 
ri k of losing out naturalists to molecular 
biology permanently! I therefore think 
that what India needs is a National Faci-
lity in molecular biology that stands 
ready to help ecologists and naturalists to 
supplement their field work with molecu-
lar techniques so that their work becomes 
internationally competent. If we do not 
pay attention to this need, we will find it 
hard to avoid the criticism that discoverie  
of global importance are being held up 
by tropical countries because they nei-
ther make the discoveries themselves nor 
do they freely allow scientists from more 
developed countries to come and work it 
out for them. Too much is at stake here 
for us to remain complacent any longer. 
 Finally, let us not forget about the frogs 
that started all this discussion in the first 
place. Gone are the days when we can 
focus our conservation efforts only on 
charismatic maga-fauna that turn on 
some prince or film-actress. We need to 
ssess the intri sic conservation values 
of different groups of organisms and 
habitats and re-work our balance of deve-
lopment and conservation. 
 
 
1. Biju, S. D. and Bossuyt, F., Nature, 2003, 
425, 711–714. 
2. Dutta, S. K., Vasudevan, K., Chaitra, M. S., 
Aggarwal, R. K. and Shanker, K., Curr. 
Sci., 2004, 86, 211–216. 
3. Bossuyt, F. and Milinkovitch, M. C., Sci-
ence, 2001, 292, 93–95. 
 
Raghavendra Gadagkar is in the Centre 
for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute 
of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India 
and Evolutionary and Organismal Bio-
logy Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for 
Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, 
Bangalore 560 64, India. 
e-mail: ragh@ces.iisc.ernet.in 
URL: ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh 
 


Next time we hear a frog croak, let's say thank you!

http://repository.ias.ac.in/23754/1/401.pdf

Next time we hear a frog croak, let's say thank you!

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Publications of the IAS Fellows