Australian green tree frog
Litoria caerulea
— Where the name comes from
Caerulea means “blue”, and it is one of the loveliest errors in nomenclature: the first specimens reached England in 1790 preserved in alcohol, which had dissolved the yellow pigment of the skin and left only the blue. The living animal is bright green, but the name has stayed the one they gave it looking into a jar.
— Facts
- Group
- Amphibians · Amphibia
- Order
- Frogs and toads
- Habitat
- Scrub, gardens, gutters, bathrooms, water tanks
- Range
- Northern and eastern Australia, New Guinea
- Size
- 7–11 cm, 60–120 g
- Diet
- Insects, spiders, small vertebrates
- Lifespan
- 16 years, over 20 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
It has adhesive discs on its toes and climbs glass.
- 02
It is placid and lets people come close: in Australia it is often in bathrooms.
- 03
Its call is a low barking that comes before rain.
— What sets it apart
From its skin have been isolated peptides that went on to a second career in pharmacology: caerulein, which regulates contraction of the gall bladder and is used in diagnosis, and a family of antibacterial molecules able to kill strains resistant to antibiotics. Amphibians live immersed in water thick with microbes and have had to invent extremely effective chemical defences: their skin is one of the least explored pharmacies on the planet, and it is vanishing before we have finished reading it.
