Scientists announce dozens of new species each year, many of them so-called 'cryptic species' that appear nearly identical
On a warm evening in the spring of 2020, Jeremy Feinberg stood at the edge of a moonlit pond. He was on the Delmarva Peninsula, on the east side of Chesapeake Bay.He cupped his hands behind his ears and swiveled back and forth, listening for a reply. Nothing. He called again.In the late 2000s, when Feinberg was studying southern leopard frogs for his Ph.D. at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, he discovered that the leopard frogs on Staten Island didn’t sound right.
But as the story of the Atlantic Coast leopard frog illustrates, for the creatures involved, the consequences of human misidentification can be more serious still—even existential. As Feinberg put it, “We can only protect what we know.”, that is—have a characteristic way of seeing the living world. We sort living things into nested categories based on their similarities and differences.
There have long been hints that this heavy reliance on a single line of evidence might be blinding us to some of the creatures around us. Charles Darwin, for instance, pointed to a group of European wrens that are almost physically identical but easily differentiated by their calls, nests, and feeding habits.
The morphologically cryptic species and their previously recognized counterparts might be physically indistinguishable to human eyes, but it’s almost certain the creatures themselves can tell which is which, whether by smell, sound, or other cues, said Sonal Singhal, an evolutionary biologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studied a group of morphologically cryptic lizards in Australia. They’re only “cryptic to us, and our limited sensory perception,” she said.
It was a vast sound, thunderous, rolling across the landscape: thousands of frogs in chorus, all singingOn a fall afternoon, many months after the trip to the Delmarva Peninsula, I met Jeremy Feinberg at his home in Richmond, Virginia. We sat in his backyard, at a table perfectly sized for his four-year-old daughter. Feinberg spread butcher paper and plastic wrap over the table. Then he showed me his collection of pickled frogs.
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