Interesting question, but nothing offhand.

I had a look and you had published on the fact it seem to be found among frogs in streaming water.

There was a small tree frog in Indonesia that I at first mistook for an insect, the name eludes me as of writing, but with that chirp I had a hunch that part of the call is ultrasonic. Now that I work on anura communication, I added a follow on you and this thread. Lets see what turns up. :)

Thanks, Anders. Yes, I have heard other small frogs calling from vegetation near streams in Indonesia as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of their calls contain ultrasonic components as well. The same for frogs in Malaysia, Thailand, etc. But I have not yet heard of something similar in Africa or South America. Thanks for your interest!

Peter

Hi Peter,

I have analyzed some calls of Hyalinobatrachium glassfrogs from the surroundings of the French Guiana shield, and I found that they most likely have ultrassonic components in their calls. More specifically, H. tricolor have harmonics reaching up to ~18 kHz and we evidenced aliasing artifcats in the spectrogram since the resulting Nyquist frequency was around 22 kHz.

Hi Davi Lee,

Fascinating stuff!

I always thought that glass frogs would be good candidates for ultrasound production.

What kind of recorder are you using, Davi Lee? With a sampling rate of 44 kHz, you will necessarily be limited to 22 kHz upper limit in your recordings, as you point out. We are using a 2-channel digital recorder from Sound Devices (model 722) and a GRAS ultrasonic microphone. The recorder has adjustable sample rates up to 192 kHz. I like this recorder very much. It can record directly onto its compact flash card and then the data can be stored on the internal 40 GByte hard drive. The recorder is small and lightweight, but a bit expensive; the microphone is also high-priced. If you can borrow one for your work, this would be a good plan. Hope this helps.

Peter

Hi Peter Narins,

that is a real nice setup! Wish I could have some of these devices to work with, specially one that I heard of that was amplitude-calibrated. But yes, these high-price devices are a kind of limitation to us, brazilians, due to the high-valued dollar.

We currently use a Marantz PMD recorder and Sennheiser shotgun mic. I think this is a standard setup for most brazilians working with frogs vocalization...

Cheers!

Hi Davi Lee,

Another possibility is if you have colleagues working on bats, the Avisoft or Pedersen bat detectors are designed to record into the ultrasound. You might borrow one of these devices to make recordings of the glass frogs. Of course then you would need a program that analyzes these sounds as well. A few years ago, a student in a class I was teaching in Denmark had a small portable inexpensive bat-call detector that cost in the neighborhood of $300. I cannot remember whether it was an App for an iphone or a stand-alone device that was the size of an iphone. If you are interested in this device, I may be able to find out more about it in the notes I took that summer.

Bests,

Peter

Hi Davi Lee,

You mentioned that Hyalinobatrachium tricolor's call contains high-frequency harmonics. Do you know the website called AmphibiaWeb? If not, this is a great source of information about everything amphibious (animals). Currently there is no photo of this species, so if you have a good photo, I am sure it would be happily accepted by the website organizers.

Cheers,

Peter

Hi, Peter Narins

I would like to hear about that App or device you mentioned from that class!

Yes, I am aware of the AmphibiaWeb site. We are still working on a manuscript concerning geographic distribution of H. tricolor and another species (H. taylori). I have analyzed the calls of these species as part of a collaboration with a researcher from the state of Amapá (Eduardo Costa Campos), in northern Brazil. I think he will probably upload some photos and call samples in these databases as soon as the article comes out!

Cheers!

Davi.

They don't have any images of the glass frog. When the Internet is flooded with pictures? I bet they could have asked someone of those also.

I look forward to you publishing Davi Lee Bang, I had a breaktrough in identifying one call that had befuddled me for the frogs I work on did come from a paper about a frog far away. And I could not understand why spending so much energy would be an advantage, over continues regular calling. The answer did come from a tree frog, and it's the multitask call.

Hi Anders,

Sorry- I didn't mean to imply that AmphibiaWeb didn't have any pictures of glass frogs- they have many. It's just that they have no pictures of that species- Hyalinobatrachium tricolor.

Cheers,

Peter

Hello Peter.

Oh I did mean this specific species. Here's one who I am certain would share as it's on one biodiversity site already.

https://inpn.mnhn.fr/espece/cd_nom/721375?lg=en

But you're right, the one mostly used on the net is Ilex the Ghost frog, the one with funny eyes.

Hi Anders,

Thanks for sharing this biodiversity site. It's a nice one. Is your work restricted to glass frogs or are you doing a broader bioacoustic study?

Peter

Peter M Narins

Hello again Sir.

No sorry if you misunderstood glass frogs at all is an interest of mine but I have not been to south America at all, neither Africa. I have done some limited fieldwork in Indonesia and Laos only. I actually do bioacustic studies, that on more common and well known species. But also have to point out that I am one of those crazy persons who do research without even having proper credentials. My part time work for Uppsala university is due to the fact that the professor is the very same person who identified the release call for the common toad, Bufo bufo - and nearly had to fight the reviewers to get them to accept his paper. So he was one of the very few who would accept my findings, and the fact that generation of researchers had missed to note what I found. It was not skill but luck however, the frog is territorial, and so it's possible to tell various sounds apart. And that's how I found a larger number of different calls than previously noted. The other part is the behaviour, and last the phenotype which also differs. Lastly I got a salamander who actually make a call, but I have been unable to determine if it's a mating or territorial call. It is very high pitched, and might indeed be partially ultrasonic. One have to stand still for hours and be very close to hear it. It took until this year before I was permitted to borrow a proper recording device, but my time is split as I have to do a second job and then COVID-19 made a mess of everything, including a trip to Kazakhstan for herp studies and DNA sampling that had to be cancelled.

Hi Davi Lee,

I looked up my notes from the bioacoustics class in which I lectured in 2019. Here is what I wrote: "We used bat detectors to identify, using real-time spectra and even an ID feature that actually identifies the species! This device (by Wildlife Acoustics) belonged to one of the students in the class. The detector uses an iphone and a plug-in US microphone and processor to convert the phone to a bat detector. All for 300€!"

Hope this helps!

Peter

Check out this article. I think this paper is yours, in the bibliographic section you can find more information

Article Pure Ultrasonic Communication in an Endemic Bornean Frog

Thank you, Luis Miguel. Yes, this is a paper done by one of my former graduate students, but there are no references to published reports of South American frogs that produce or detect ultrasound (as far as I know)! Peter