“I remember every detail of that night.” It was November 2011 and Brian Curry was on the lookout for a frog. As it was late in the year and most amphibians would be hiding away for the winter, the chances of finding a specimen were slim, especially as he was standing on Staten Island, less than 15km from the Statue of Liberty. “I did not arrive at the site with high hopes,” he says.

Against these odds, Curry came away with a single specimen that night. Three years later, there is now compelling evidence that it belongs to a new species of leopard frog, one that had gone unnoticed because of its striking resemblance to two other species that have a similar range. “It was one of my most exciting biological moments,” he says.

Back in 2011, Curry was majoring in landscape architecture and design at Rutgers University and moonlighting as a herpetological field researcher for doctoral student Jeremy Feinberg. There had been a large amount of rain that autumn, which meant that Curry had to wade into the flooded landscape in search of his amphibious quarry.



After 40 minutes, he’d drawn a blank and was just about to get back into the car when he heard the unmistakable “chuckle” of a leopard frog. “Excited, I made my way back into the water, hoping I would find that lone frog,” says Curry. As he swept his flashlight over the surface, it reflected off a pair of eyes at the base of a red maple tree. “Because of the temperature, the frog was very slow and easy to capture.” He examined it and could see that its vocal sacs were distended, strongly suggesting that it was the same frog he’d heard calling.



I heard what I knew was a leopard frog chuckle coming from a small corner of the hardwood swamp forest.

In 2012, molecular analysis of toe clippings from this specimen revealed that it had a unique genetic makeup, leading to the idea that this might be “a new species of leopard frog from the urban northeastern US.” A follow-up paper, published today in PLOS ONE, combines the genetics with careful analysis of the vocalisations of this frog, providing compelling evidence that this is indeed the case. The researchers have proposed that it should be called the Atlantic coast leopard frog or Rana kauffeldi.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen often. Over the last three decades, this is only the second new new frog species to have been identified in all of mainland US and Canada. The last time anyone turned up a new frog on the US Atlantic coast was in 1955. Even more remarkable that it should have been found in a swamp on Staten Island, so close to the restless streets of Manhattan.

This study underscores something rather wonderful. In the words of Feinberg, Curry et al, “it demonstrates that undocumented species can still reside in some of the most urbanized and densely inhabited parts of the world; these areas can harbor significant biodiversity and, with proper management, simultaneously protect that diversity and provide valuable educational opportunities to urban communities.”