Scientists find bizarre lungless frog

By Charles Q. Choi

updated 12:47 p.m. ET April 7, 2008

The first lungless frog has been discovered lurking in the jungles of Borneo.

The enigmatic amphibian, dubbed Barbourula kalimantanensis, apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin.

Scientists first saw one of these frogs 30 years ago, but due to their rarity, just one other specimen had been collected since then and neither had been dissected.

"No one thought to open them up — there was no real reason to believe that they could be lungless," said researcher David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. "Because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one specimen in your museum, you don't want to rip it open!"

The amphibians, no more than 2 inches long, have proven elusive because they live in cold, fast rivers in remote areas of the rainforests of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Also, they are slippery "and can be surprisingly fast for short bursts," Bickford said. "We had a team of 11 people looking for these frogs and it took us almost two weeks before we found any."

He and his colleagues had no idea this frog would be lungless.

"I was just going to be happy if we simply rediscovered the frogs," Bickford said. "It had been 30 years of intermittent searching for this frog until we could put together a multinational team and get to the last remaining areas where it could realistically be found."

As Bickford and his colleagues went snorkeling in the rivers where the frogs live, the water proved so cold that "after just 45 minutes of snorkeling, I would have to stop because I was shaking uncontrollably, my lips were blue, and my breathing became too labored to actually snorkel effectively," Bickford told LiveScience. "This is lowland rain forest in Borneo, just off the equator, and I had hypothermia! That certainly was something I was not entirely prepared for."

"There are so many difficulties in field work, and yet it remains my biggest joy," Bickford added. "Having the undeniable privilege of going out to these remote sites, seeing some of the last and greatest treasures that exist in the wild, and then getting to study them — well, every day I feel lucky."

As the researchers were doing initial dissections of the frogs as they caught them in the field, they were surprised to discover these amphibians lacked lungs.

"At first I did not believe that the frogs had no lungs, but then, we just kept on seeing the evidence pile up. I was flabbergasted," Bickford said.

"The thing that struck me most then and now is that there are still major firsts — for example, first lungless frog! — to be found out in the field," Bickford added. "All you have to do is go a little ways beyond what people have done before, and — voila!"

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