Finding a New Species of Frog in New York Is Really Hard

At the end of last week, news travelled that a new frog had been discovered, not in some remote corner of jungle, but right in the middle of New York.

Jeremy Feinberg, a doctoral candidate in ecology at Rutgers University, is the lead author on a paper published in PLOS One that describes the new species of leopard frog, which was previously confused with two other similar frogs. The researchers named it Rana kauffeldi after ecologist Carl Kauffeld, who first detailed the frog in 1937 but ultimately failed to prove it was in fact a distinct species.

It's not every day you discover a whole new species in the middle of one of the world's most thoroughly explored areas. As part of our new series that looks at the real work that goes into scientific discoveries, Feinberg told us about how he found a new frog more or less by chance, and the effort it took to prove it.

MOTHERBOARD: So you discovered a new species of frog. How do you even go about doing that?
Jeremy Feinberg: People who do this as part of their career, they usually target areas where there hasn't been a lot of research or where there's really high biodiversity. This is typically a rainforest or a remote region that just hasn't had a lot of scientific study done. So in the case of this discovery, there was no intention, there was no plan; this was a complete and total accident.

My background isn't in either genetics or taxonomy, so the last thing I expected to do was find a new species. I'm a field ecologist, and I was out in the field doing work on the frog that I normally do work on and just had the good fortune of noticing a call that the males make when they vocalise that was just not what it was supposed to be for the species it was considered to be. That was really the starting point for this adventure that basically played out over six years.

Great, so you basically just stumbled across it.
You could say so! I really did. I think the fact that a) I wasn't really prepared or trained for this and b) this happened in New York City and not in one of these remote areas—it created a bit of doubt and skepticism among colleagues who could've helped me move further on the genetics side. I had to shop it around for a while, and I just went to anyone I knew who did genetics.

I got a lot of encouraging laughs and pats on the back, but I think most people thought they'd just pass on it. It took about two years before I was fortunate enough to land in the good hands of three geneticists: Catherine Newman, Brad Schaffer, and Leslie Rissler. These were folks that were doing work on leopard frogs and other projects, and they were willing to humour me and look into it on the genetics side.

What's the hardest part of your job?
Well, in this case the hardest part was knowing that the sort of background and training that I have is really in traditional field ecology, which has to an extent fallen out of vogue and been replaced by more of the molecular technology stuff. What was really hard was when I knew I was onto something and I said, boy, I have a really strong gut feeling—where the heck do I go with this though? People are just going to laugh, they're going to be, "Ah, isn't that cute? A field ecologist in New York thinks he found a new species…"

The second answer to the question, I did not know how to write a new species description or how to do bioacoustic analysis, and those were the parts that I really put most of my time into. I was the lead author on the paper but I also did the bioacoustic analysis. It was really incredible having to teach myself on the fly two completely new areas of science in year six or seven of my PhD that was focused on completely different topics.

In a nutshell, how did you do that?
Coming from the outside, I just read a lot of species descriptions. I narrowed it down to vertebrates, to reptiles and amphibians, to salamanders and frogs, and then specifically the frogs. I saw sort of a style and a pattern that was being used to describe new frogs. I just realised, ok, here's how this is done. Occasionally I could ask experts but I didn't have access to people who had done a lot of these. The team I work with, none of them are really taxonomists.

In terms of the bioacoustics, same thing; I started downloading software, learning how to use it—really self-taught. I just looked at other papers that had done bioacoustic analysis. The final piece of the puzzle, which was actually one of the hardest parts of this, was to go out in the field and get proper recordings of not just our species, but all five species that we looked at, because we wanted to be really thorough.

How do you explain what you do to people who aren't scientists?
It's hard. Most people, especially in my college years and earlier in my career, people would say, "This is Jeremy, he's my friend, he's a park ranger," or, "This is Jeremy, he's my friend, he's a marine biologist." That's really interesting, for most people the catch phrases when they think of people doing anything within ecology, they either default to park ranger or marine biologist. So I would step back and say, "Well I definitely don't wear a hat and have any sort of enforcement ability, which would be a park ranger, and I definitely don't work in systems of salt water; I only work in fresh water."

I basically explain to people that I study wildlife and I study their ecology and conservation. Once you explain that and then add the fact that I focus on reptiles and amphibians, they pretty quickly get it.

What are you working on now?
I actually had a PhD planned when this accident happened. I was in year five or six of that degree when this behemoth of a discovery just plopped itself in front of me and became top priority and basically shut down my PhD writing at that time. So I'm really excited; I'm finally returning to my actual dissertation work.

This new species is going to be one of three chapters of the dissertation, but the other two are going back to my real passion and what I intended to study, which is: why did leopard frogs go extinct from Long Island in New York? Long Island is the largest island in the lower 48 states, so it's a massive area, and between 1980 and 2000 there was a very precipitous decline in the leopard frog population to the point where they vanished without anyone really noticing.

I started asking around 10-15 years ago—Has anybody noticed these frogs have gone?—including the state biologists that are supposed to track these things. People were like, "No, there's supposed to be populations here and there," and I was like, "Nope, they're not there; they're gone."

I'm really excited to finish writing the work that I did to understand why they vanished, and that work is actually what led to the accidental discovery of the new species, but there's a whole line of research I did separate from the new species that looks at how tadpoles survive when they're brought back to the places where they disappeared. We raised them in these mesh tanks to just see what happened to them when they were raised in these sort of extinction wetlands, so there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that's going to be coming out of that research.

Science Is Really Hard is a new series where Motherboard asks scientists about the real work that goes on behind scientific discoveries and what their jobs actually involve.