Thursday 3 September 2009

Mysterious (to me at least) frog identity found.....

The mysterious green frog that climbed my window last September is a Gray Tree Frog! Hyla versicolor! What threw me in attempted identification was the colour. It took me a three-month interaction with specimens at the Natural History Museum to finally make the discovery. The main problem that I had in identification was the gray bit. I didn't know they could be green, nor that they could be metachrosis, or change colour to match their environment.

Here's the breakdown of the species: http://amphibiaweb.org/cgi/amphib_query?where-genus=Hyla&where-species=versicolor&account=amphibiaweb