Wallpaper Monday

Okay, I’m cheating a little bit today. This week’s featured “wallpaper” really isn’t big enough to qualify. In fact, the largest image I could find is only 647 x 430 pixels.

But after reading news about flooding in Pakistan, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, massive fires in Russia, and a Glenn Beck rally in Washington DC, I thought we all needed something unequivocally, inarguably wonderful to brighten our day.

So here it is:

This little guy is Microhyla nepenthicola, a new microfrog just discovered in Borneo. It’s not quite the smallest frog in the world, but it’s the smallest to be found in Europe, Asia or Africa. It lays its eggs on the insides of a particular species of pitcher plant, and the tadpoles swim in the water retained at the bottom of the pitcher. (Water which, I should add, contains enzymes that dissolve insects unlucky enough to drown inside the plant. So these tadpoles grow up in a pretty rough neighborhood.)

The frog in the above photo is newly metamorphosed, so it’s not representative of the true adult size of the species. This is:

Both photos are courtesy of Professor Indraneil Das (Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation), who clearly has one of the coolest jobs in the world. He says there are 100-year-old specimens of these frogs in museums, but they were misidentified as juveniles of a different species. Hey, just like Triceratops and Torosaurus! On a slightly smaller scale, that is.