Scientists have identified seven new species of a tiny poisonous frog, though each one apparently came from a different mountain in southeastern Brazil.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal PeerJ increased the total species of the Brachycephalus from 21 to 28. Though they measure no more than one centimeter, their skin is poisonous to ward off prey.
"Although getting to many of the field sites is exhausting, there was always the feeling of anticipation and curiosity about what new species could look like," project leader Marcio Pie, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Paraná, said in a press release.
The region the scientists searched is known as the "cloud forests" and its mountains' peaks are set apart by valleys that tend to run warmer closer to the ground. The identifications of these new species reportedly took five years.
"It's a really exciting experience, because we have a good expectation that each mountain top will have a new species, but we don't know what it's going to look like," Pie told BBC News. "So we play around while we plan each trip, and try to anticipate what the species is going to look like.
"It takes a lot of practice and sometimes it's very frustrating, to go up the mountain for many hours and come back empty-handed."
The frogs' skin is not the only way they avoid being eaten, as the scientists said they would often hear the frogs without seeing them. This deception would likely make it hard on snakes, the frogs' primary predator, from finding them.
"You can hear them singing and there's probably hundreds of them, but you simply can't catch them," Pie said. "Because once you get closer, just from the vibration in the ground, they keep silent for, say, 20 minutes or half an hour. And then you have to go through the leaf litter very carefully with your hands."
