By: Claire McCullough
According to SciTech Daily, Brachychphalus dacnis, also known as the Flea Toad, has recently been discovered in Brazil. According to Dustin Wilgers, a McPherson College biology professor, the toad’s genus, first part of the Latin name, means “short-headed or flat-faced”. The toad’s species name, second part of the Latin name, also means something as well.
A phys.org article written by FAPESP stated that the species was named after an educational, research and conservation-driven group known as project Dacnis. SciTech Daily reported that Brachychphalus dacnis is the 7th species of flea toad to be found.
SciTech Daily states that at some point in the flea toad’s evolution, it went through a process known as miniaturization. They also state that the “loss, reduction, and/or fusion of bones as well as fewer digits and absence of other parts of their anatomy” is what allows them to become smaller. As a result, the species is very small, and as adults they are smaller than a dime. However, because of the toad’s size, Wilgers thinks that’s why it remained undiscovered. He said “It’s easy to discover, see, and describe the large things. It’s more difficult to find and characterize the smaller ones that we don’t oftentimes see with the naked eye and that goes even down to bacteria. There’s just so much we don’t know about small things that go unnoticed.”
Wilgers also mentioned that even though the flea toad was recently discovered, it very well could be facing extinction. “There are things that go extinct all the time without us even noticing or having described them,” Wilgers said. Right now in the tropics, amphibians are more likely to go extinct due to factors such as climate change, habitat loss and destruction, and invasive species of fungi. While the toads size might cause it to be over looked, every species fulfills an important job on the planet, and no matter if they have been identified or not, the world would not be the same without them.
