Croak, Croak, Croak: Are There More Frogs to be Discovered in the Western Ghats?

Perhaps nothing in the recent past has stirred so much euphoria among the Indian taxonomists and scientists working on biodiversity as have the few reports on the dramatic discovery of new species of frogs from the two regions, the Western Ghats in India and Sri Lanka (see ref. 1 for more details). While one group from the Sri Lankan region reported 200 new species2 (but only 100 species in their recent report)3 , another study in the Western Ghats region of India reported 115 species mostly from the genus Philautus – all new to science!4 Accordingly, it has been argued that the Western Ghats along with Sri Lanka could represent the global hotspot of amphibian radiation and that there could be many more species waiting to be discovered by herpetologists working in these regions. A recent discovery of a Gondwanaland relic frog family Nasikabatrachidae5,6 has only reinforced this notion