This week, UC Berkeley announced the amazing growth of its project, AmphibiaWeb, an online catalogue of the world’s amphibians created to encourage more field monitoring and lab studies of the threatened animals.

David Wake, an Academy fellow from UC Berkeley, started the project in 2000 because amphibians were declining at a terrifying rate and he was concerned we’d lose species we didn’t even know existed. “In 1985, there were a handful of amphibian biologists in the whole world,” he says. “Now, the numbers [of scientists] have increased dramatically, and we are getting to the ends of the earth.”

The Academy’s amphibian biologist Dave Blackburn has contributed to AmphibiaWeb for about ten years and recently became more involved in expanding the project. “I joined the steering committee nearly three years ago. I actively work as part of a team on issues related to the systematics displayed on AmphibiaWeb, but, perhaps more importantly, am actively invested in ways of improving our services, such as an iPhone app (available for download now, but major improvement coming soon!), summary diagrams of evolutionary relationships among amphibian groups, and general ideas for improving the content for diverse viewers.”

The more viewers the better. Earlier this summer, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) assessed that about 41 percent of amphibian species are at risk of extinction, and some are already extinct. These charismatic creatures are disappearing for many reasons—a warming Earth, increasing population, widespread use of pesticides and a deadly fungus.

But AmphibiaWeb is succeeding! With only about 4000 species known in 1985, AmphibiaWeb now boasts 7,000 species! Woo-hoo! (Fist-pump or –bump!)

Now that’s something to sing about! “An undergraduate researcher assisting with AmphibiaWeb suggested the idea of a song when it came to celebrating the scientific description of the 7,000th amphibian,” Dave explains. “We’ve known since early this year that we’d probably hit number 7,000 some time in the summer based on the rate of descriptions of new species over the past few years. I happen to have a good friend (Conor Loughridge, performing as The Wiggly Tendrils) from college that writes songs for a living. We asked if he would be willing to help us out, and when he said yes, Conor and I worked together on content for the song (though the rest was left up to him to make it catchy and fun!).

“The general idea is to simply catch attention,” Dave adds. “The idea is to highlight the excellent work done by amphibian biologists around the world and the fact that we are still in a crisis. We are losing many populations and species of amphibians around the world due to climate change, habitat degradation and destruction, disease and pollution. In some cases, we’ve lost them before we even knew they existed.”

What a great way to spread the news! Is the tune stuck in your head yet? Pass it along!

Image: Alessandro Catenazzi

In a surprising reversal of fortune, Israeli researchers have found a certain group of beetle larvae that feed on frogs.

As Ed Yong reports in his Discover blog:

During its lifetime, a frog will snap up thousands of insects with its sticky, extendable tongue. But if it tries to eat an Epomis beetle, it’s more likely to become a meal than to get one.

The larvae have shown 100% success in their ability to lure the frogs into becoming a meal. In fact, these beetles eat nothing else in the larval stage. Here are the gruesome details.

According to the researchers, Epomis larvae combine a sit-and-wait strategy with unique movements of their antennae and mouthparts to draw the attention of an amphibian (frogs and toads were used in the study). Thinking it has spotted potential prey, the amphibian comes closer and the larva increases the intensity of these enticing motions.

When the amphibian attacks, the larva manages to avoid the predator’s tongue and uses its unique double-hooked mouthparts to attach itself to the amphibian’s body and initiate feeding, which can include both sucking of bodily fluids and chewing body tissues, usually killing the much larger amphibian.

“It seems that instead of serving as food items for amphibians, Epomis larvae have evolved to specifically take advantage of amphibians as a food source,” says researcher Gil Wizen.

These findings extend the perspective of co-evolution in the arms race between predator and prey and suggest that counterattack defense behavior has evolved into predator-prey role reversal.

The research is published in the online journal PLoS ONE. Images and video of the beetle and the frightening attack can be found at Wired and Discover.

Image: Gil Wizen/AFTAU

“I don’t imagine you’ll ever hear the phrase ‘seal the deal’ again, unless perhaps the worst worst-case scenarios unfold and the climate system comes utterly unglued.” That’s Andrew Revkin’s reaction to the closing of the Cancun climate talks in today’s New York Times. Heads of States seemed to be missing, debates continue to rage over the Kyoto Protocol and developing nations’ and climate-affected island states’ shouts were not heard. From New Scientist:

…on the platform, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Jean Ping, noted that “Africa’s billion people are polluting roughly as much as Texas, which has 25 million people.” But Barack Obama was not there to answer.

The talks end today… don’t expect too much, says Nature’s The Great Beyond blog:

Contrary to Copenhagen, the goal going into Cancun was to make incremental progress. That seemed doable at the time, but nobody is taking anything for granted today.

Now for some fun! Through Twitter, we found this great defense of the existence of Santa… in the Multiverse. Yes, Virginia…

Follow that frog! Did you know that frogs’ bladders can hunt and remove foreign objects in their bodies? In their attempts to track frogs in Australia, scientists were implanting the amphibians with bead-sized transmitters. Within a few weeks, the transmitters had moved to their bladders and/or had simply been expelled (peed) out and left behind. Lab tests followed and results published. Read more here or here.

Bio-Inspiration: Ants travels could lead to better computer networks. According to Nature News, Argentine ants are so adept at finding the shortest routes to food and changing those routes when necessary (high traffic, obstacles), that systems engineers are hoping to learn from their behavior and build more efficient networks.

Continue to follow Science Today’s efficient science news network and lead us down some new paths by adding your comments below!

As if Saturn wasn’t already considered drop-dead gorgeous. And as if Cassini wasn’t already the luckiest satellite in the skies. Using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS), scientists gathered data to create beautiful images and even a video of auroras on the ringed planet. Released just today, these are truly a must see!

Also published today, in the journal Science, independent researchers have calculated the vastness of the BP oil spill by viewing videos of the underwater oil gushing. From Science News:

Crone and Tolstoy used an optical technique known as flow velocimetry. In this approach, the volume of a roiling plume is estimated by using video or a series of photos to measure the movements of a host of distinguishing features over a short period of time. Computers can then calculate likely flow volumes based on the plume’s size and density.

And their numbers exceed the government estimate by about 300,000 barrels (or 12.6 million gallons) of oil.

Earlier this week, scientists published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the affect of dust on Colorado’s snowpack. According to Reuters and Yale Environment 360:

Dust created by intensifying human activities in the southwestern United States has caused snow in the Rocky Mountains to melt earlier over the last 150 years and has reduced runoff into the Colorado River basin by about 5 percent, according to a new study.

For a drought-prone area, this makes a potentially bad situation worse.

So, now for a bit of good news. A month ago, we reported on Conservation International’s launch of a worldwide search for 100 species or so of amphibians that were possibly extinct. This week, they announced three of those species were spotted—two in Africa and one in Mexico. You can read more at the 80beats blog on Discover.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!

Auroras

National Geographic had some great images of the auroras that came out of the solar activity on August 1st.

WISE Losing its Cool

Universe Today reported this week that the WISE satellite only has a few more months of operation:

The spacecraft is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep its heat-sensitive instrument chilled, and will only be in operation for 2-3 more months. While the spacecraft was designed to be rather short-lived – 7 to 10 months — it still is sad to see the mission winding down.

Alternative Energy Bonanza

We reported on renewable energy in the news earlier this week, and today, Science magazine devotes an entire special issue to clean energy. Even if you don’t have a subscription, you can download the entire section for free before the end of the month.

Frog Hunt

Earlier this week, news outlets reported a new search for amphibians, organized by Conservation International, that will take place over the next two months. From Wired:

Scientists in 14 countries on five continents are teaming up to hunt for as many as 100 species of amphibians that are thought to possibly be extinct, but may be surviving in remote corners.

We’ll stay tuned to see what they discover…

Climate

Climate was covered in many news items from the floods in Pakistan to the fires in Russia to the all-time heat records worldwide to the iceberg that broke away from Greenland. From the Huffington Post:

No one knows for sure whether any of these natural disasters — with the possible exception of the floating iceberg — are directly traceable to climate change, but they are certainly consistent with climate change forecasts. And, if they are, they clearly suggest that more records and more disasters are on the horizon.

What did you find interesting in science news this week? Why? Share with us.

Last week, a team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and UC Berkeley published the first genome sequence of a frog, the western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis, in the journal Science.

“A lot of furry animals have been sequenced, but far fewer other vertebrates,” says co-author Richard Harland, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. “Having a complete catalog of the genes in Xenopus, along with those of humans, rats, mice and chickens, will help us reassemble the full complement of ancestral vertebrate genes.”

And, according to Nature:

What’s most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian’s genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. “There are megabases of sequence where gene order has changed very little since the last common ancestor” of amphibians, birds and mammals about 360 million years ago, says bioinformaticist Uffe Hellsten at the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, a co-author on the study.

For some, it may be surprising that X. tropicalis was chosen as the subject for this genome sequencing study since its relative, the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, is more well known as the “go-to” study organism for developmental and cell biology research.  However, it was decided that since X. tropicalis has a shorter developmental time and has the typical two copies per gene rather than four, as is found in X. laevis, it would be the more practical model to go with this time around.

By studying the frog genome, researchers are also hoping to learn more about the mechanisms by which certain man-made chemicals are detrimentally affecting frogs around the world. In some cases, these chemicals mimic frogs’ own hormones, ultimately disrupting normal biological function.  So their presence in lakes and streams may be contributing to the decline of frog populations worldwide. (You can learn more about UC Berkeley’s Tyrone Hayes’ research on the affects of the pesticide atrazine on frogs’ endocrine (controls hormones) and reproductive systems here.)

“Hopefully,” Hellsten says, “understanding the effects of these hormone disruptors will help us preserve frog diversity and, since these chemicals also affect humans, could have a positive effect on human health.”

Some 80 million pounds of the herbicide atrazine are applied annually on U.S. farms to control weeds and increase crop yield, but such widespread use also makes atrazine the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water, according to various studies.

Since 2002, Hayes has known that tadpoles raised in atrazine-contaminated water become hermaphrodites. His recent study goes even farther: atrazine also wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in ten into females.

This had been difficult to prove because male and female frogs are difficult to tell apart. And even under a microscope, frog chromosomes appear the same.

To overcome such challenges, Hayes’s colleague Roger Liu developed a line of all-male frogs so that the genetics would be unequivocal. At the same time, in 2008, another lab discovered a sex-linked genetic marker, making it easier to distinguish between males and females.

The 75% of male frogs that are emasculated can simply not reproduce, while the 10% that become females can mate, but their offspring are entirely male. Another 10% are not affected by atrazine at all. Hayes and his colleagues published their findings earlier this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other recent studies have also found a possible link between human birth defects and low birth weight due to atrazine exposure in the womb. While atrazine is already banned in Europe, the Environmental Protection Agency is still reviewing its regulations on use of the pesticide.

As amphibian populations decline worldwide for a variety of reasons, let’s hope that atrazine can eventually cease to be a threat.