Mick Hartley

Rediscovered – the Bornean Rainbow Toad (via):

[© Indraneil Das]

The Sambas Stream Toad, or Bornean Rainbow Toad as it’s also called (Ansonia latidisca) was previously known from only three individuals, and was last seen in 1924 – the same year Vladimir Lenin died, and Greece declared itself a republic.  Prior to the rediscovery, only illustrations of the mysterious and long-legged toad existed, after collection by European explorers in the 1920s. 

Because of this, scientists with CI and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) SSC Amphibian Specialist Group believed that chances of finding the species alive were slimmer than the toad's unusually slender limbs, so they listed it as one of the 'World's Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs', in a global campaign to seek out amphibians that had not been seen in a decade or longer.  They hoped that the campaign would inspire researchers around the world to employ local expertise to mobilize targeted searches.

Dr. Indraneil Das of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) was one of those inspired researchers.  After announcing his new discovery of a tiny pea-sized frog in Borneo last summer, the Old World’s smallest, Das and his team targeted the missing Sambas Stream Toad species for rediscovery last August.

Initial searches by Dr. Das and team took place during evenings after dark along the 1,329 m. high rugged ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range of Western Sarawak, a natural boundary between Malaysia’s Sarawak State and Indonesia’s Kalimantan Barat Province. The team’s first expeditions proved fruitless in their first several months, but the team did not give up.  The area had barely been explored in the past century, with no concerted efforts to determine whether the species was still alive. So Das changed his team’s strategy to include higher elevations and they resumed the search.

And then one night, Mr. Pui Yong Min, one of Dr Das's graduate students found a small toad 2m up a tree.  When he realized it was the long-lost toad, Dr. Das expressed relief and near disbelief at the discovery before his eyes.