My son Raphael and I spent this past weekend on a farm outside of Caledon in the Overberg. We went quad biking, we learned how to fly fish (kind of - no actual fish were caught but we had fun trying!), Raph swam (aka jumped in an out) of a freezing cold pool at the foot of a waterfall – and we had a slap up breakfast with the farmer and his wife who told us all about a newly discovered species of frog found in two places on their farm.

Rough Moss Frog. Image Source: SA Reptiles

The frog is known as the Rough Moss Frog due to the rough upper surface described in the following quote from an online article I subsequently found:

“A new species of moss frog (genus Arthroleptella) is described from the Klein Swartberg Mountain near Caledon in the Western Cape Province, South Africa to which it is confined. This allopatric species is distinguished … by the large number of very distinct glandular protuberances on the dorsal surfaces, unique calls and by molecular differences.”

There are lots of frogs in the area – we heard many of them singing away while we tried to catch fish at one of the dams – but according to the farmer, this particular species is not only rare but it has an unusual feature – the young frogs come out of the eggs fully formed as teeny tiny frogs! We found this fascinating - As Raph is learning about frogs in Natural Science this was of particular interest. Did this mean some frogs don't go through metamorphosis?

Wanting to confirm this I tracked down Andrew Turner at CapeNature– the expert on amphibians in general and this species in particular. He told me over the telephone that this is indeed the case – but it doesn’t mean that there is no metamorphosis - there is a simple metamorphosis. What happens is that the tadpole develops inside the egg prior to hatching in what is called ‘direct development’ or ‘terrestrial breeding.’

Andrew explained that this is fairly unusual but wide spread – there are a number of frog species in South Africa and around the world that hatch fully formed frogs.

So now you know! Not all frogs’ eggs hatch as tadpoles!

Image source: SA Reptiles.