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Biology professor shares groundbreaking research on endangered plant-breeding frogs at World Congress of Herpetology

Twenty years ago, Richard Lehtinen became fascinated with plant-breeding frogs while doing graduate studies research in Madagascar. Today, as the Theron L. Peterson and Dorothy R. Peterson Professor in Biology at ���鵺��̳, Lehtinen continues his research, involves ���鵺��̳ students, and works with and shares his findings with other scientists across the globe.

Richard Lehtinen, Theron L. Peterson and Dorothy R. Peterson Professor in Biology at ���鵺��̳, presented research at a plant-breeding frog symposium he co-facilitated as part of the quadrennial World Congress of Herpetology in Borneo.

Last August, he co-facilitated, with Yeong-Choy Kam of Tunghai University in Taiwan, a plant-breeding frog symposium that was part of the quadrennial World Congress of Herpetology in Borneo. The symposium was a reprisal of a symposium they had organized in 2002.

Among his presentations at symposia during the 2024 World Congress was research about the golden treefrog. The topic was based on an article co-authored with Dan Borowsky ’23 titled “Conservation status and natural history of a mountaintop endemic: Updates on the golden treefrog from Trinidad.” Lehtinen and Borowsky traveled to the Trinidad mountaintops in 2022 to learn what they could about the elusive golden treefrog. Though Lehtinen has worked in ecology, evolution, and behavior conservation, he always maintained an interest in and involved ���鵺��̳ students in studying plant-breeding frogs.

Their most significant discovery in 2022 was that the endangered golden treefrog, once thought to be silent, has its own breeding call. Lehtinen was the first to audio and video record the frog’s vocalizations when he traveled to Trinidad a couple months after the trip with Borowsky. “Witnessing that was exciting and honestly one of the best nights of the last 10 to 20 years of my life,” he said.

Studying the golden treefrog is difficult because their known habitat is limited to the tops of three mountains in Trinidad and one in nearby Venezuela. Because the frogs live in rainwater-filled plants far up in the canopy, the field biologists had to drag a collapsible ladder up the mountain to access them. “The frog is trapped on these mountaintops because it’s adapted to the cooler conditions that are up at higher elevations, and it can’t survive at lower elevations,” Lehtinen said. “It’s not like it is on a mountain side where it can work its way further up to avoid warmer temperatures.”

Because the frog can’t move up the mountain, it is at a grave risk of global extinction. Lehtinen is trying to help determine if the frog, which has been on the planet longer than humans have existed, is endangered enough “to warrant an emergency effort to get them into captive breeding to prevent them from going extinct,” he said. “If they are going to go extinct, it’s because of us and climate change.”

Dan Borowsky ’23 co-authored an article with Lehtinen about the golden treefrog based on their research in Trinidad.

Lehtinen will be on research leave in fall 2025 to continue studying the golden treefrog. The importance of discovering its breeding call “gives us a tool to monitor them in a much easier and more rigorous fashion than we were able to do before,” he said. He plans to use that information to capture the vocalization on automated recorders deployed all the way up the mountain.

“Now that we know what the frogs sound like, we can use a computer to go through tens of thousands of audio recordings to search for the frog’s sounds,” he said. “If the audio recordings are only at the top, then we have our answer that they are really stuck at the top,” he said. However, if sounds are heard at lower levels on the mountain, the frogs may occur more widely on these mountains than initial research suggests, “Now that we have this obscure detail about their lives figured out, we will have a much better sense if captive breeding is necessary or not,” he said.

In addition to the golden treefrog research he presented at the world congress symposium, he also introduced the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior of Phytotelma-Breeding Anurans symposium in August and presented Is bromeliad breeding in poison frogs a commensalism? which was co-authored by Mackenzie Goltz ‘20, McKenna Gassman ’21, and Vincent Dileo ’24.

Lehtinen believes attending conferences to learn and share the latest research is important for scientists and faculty. “It helps us progress in our fields whether it is linguistics, nuclear physics or plant-breeding frogs,” he said. Making connections with other experts helps keep his knowledge current, especially at a conference like the World Congress of Herpetology. “I am more in the know and up to speed on current knowledge that I can impart on ���鵺��̳ students in my classes,” he said.

Featured image: Professor Lehtinen and Dan Borowsky ’23 traveled to Trinidad to study the endangered golden treefrog (pictured).

All photos provided by Lehtinen.

Posted in Homepage Featured, News on February 19, 2025.