LIKE A WESTERN SUNSET
IT WAS A hot summer’s day in January 1994 when Pierre Horwitz had his first memorable encounter with a sunset frog. “I was with my research assistant Kim and we were finishing our year-long survey of peatlands in the South West,” he recalls. They were holidaying with their families near Walpole when the pair decided on an impromptu field trip to a site they’d already surveyed three times. “I thought I’d have a final look to make sure I hadn’t missed anything,” Pierre says. “I reached down and put my hand into the peat, which I don’t do often. Under a peat ledge I felt something wet walk onto my hand. Instead of flicking it off, I gently cupped my hand – I don’t really know why – and brought it up.” When Pierre unfurled his fingers, a small, dark frog lay on his palm. “Then it fell over on its back, and suddenly there was this extraordinary amount of colour.” Deep blue lower torso, light cerulean blue mid-belly, and bright orange covering its upper body. Even the frog’s hands and feet were a gold-orange hue. “I’d never seen anything like it. I called out to Kim and said, ‘Come and have a look at this.’ We were both quite stunned.” The researchers gingerly carried the frog back to the car, opened all the text books they’d brought along and tried to identify it.
“It didn’t look like anything anybody had written about or photographed before,” Pierre says. “So it was really quite a fortuitous moment that you don’t really plan for.”
It took several more weeks before they could confirm Pierre had discovered a species new to science. “We were trying to keep the frog alive in quite warm weather over a couple of weeks while on holiday, in a hessian bag with some moss. By keeping it cool and wet, it survived happily until we got it back to Perth,” Pierre says. He was keen to consult his senior colleague, Grant Wardell-Johnson. “One very hot day, Grant came out to the university and as soon as he saw it he said, ‘This is amazing.’ We thought we really needed to take it down to the Department of Conservation staff. So we went down there and a crowd gathered! We realised this was something pretty special.” Pierre had not only discovered a new species, but a new genus – since named Spicospina after unusual spines on the frog’s central vertebrae. The species name
flammocaerulea means orange-blue. Another two years passed before the sunset frog was formally described, and almost immediately classified as a species under threat. “We were able to demonstrate it had a limited range and faced declining rainfall and potentially drying and burning peats. We nominated it for listing at state and federal level, where it’s been regarded as vulnerable.” A recovery plan was drawn up, “but there’s still [much] more we need to know about how it’s going to be affected by declining rainfall and fire”.
For the common name, Pierre first thought of harlequin frog, but that was already claimed by a South American species. “It occurred to me the orange upper part and the blue of the bottom part were [just] like the western sunset. So we called it the sunset frog.”