Updates from Michael Mahony
The common mantra for persistence in the face of climate change is the need for all living beings to adapt or perish. If it is not possible to adapt, then mitigating the impacts of climate will be necessary to prevent extinction. Humans can mitigate the impacts of warming by building better insulated homes and using air-conditioners or by shifting to more favourable climate zones. Mitigating the impact is not something that all living organisms can do, especially shifting their home! Shifting to areas of cooler climate may be a possibility for some biota but not for all, especially those that persist in isolated habitats.
A big question among scientist is whether biota can adapt to the rapid changes in their environment brought about by human associated climate change since there is often no way it will be possible for humans to assist and mitigate the huge scale of the impact of climate change for all ecosystems and species.
There is considerable debate among scientists about whether some or all biota have capacity and time to adapt to the rapid pace of climate change, and how to deal with the extensive mitigation that will be needed.
A newly published study by a team from the University of Newcastle, South Australian Museum and James Cook University shows that two newly discovered small tree frogs have not adapted to slow paced climate change as the Australian continent warmed and dried over millennia. Today these frogs only persist in isolated, cool and moist upland environments. One of the new species The Eungella Whirring Frog occurs only above 900 metres elevation in cool montane temperate forest on the crest of Eungella Range in mid-east Queensland. Its total known distribution is less that a 20 square kilometre, and it is separated from its nearest relative the Atherton Whirring Frog by several hundred kilometres. There is no possible way that either of these frogs can shift to cooler habitats further south. They are isolated on high mountains where the climate models predict increasing temperatures and drier summers. They are literally running out of suitable living space.
Understanding the factors that have created the amazing diversity of Australia’s biota is a fundamental goal of evolutionary biologists and is also critical to addressing how we manage their survival as the threat of climate change and other human impacts grow.
In a study just published in the international journal Zootaxa, scientists from the University of Newcastle, the South Australian Museum, and James Cook University collaborated to find that the Whirring Tree Frogs from eastern Queensland and north-eastern NSW comprises three species Litoria revelata from the eastern fall of the Great Dividing Range in NSW and south-eastern Queensland, L. corbeni from the Atherton Tablelands, and the newly discovered L. eungellensis from the Eungella Range, near Mackay. The ranges of three species are separated by significant gaps of some 400 to 800 km of unsuitable habitat. The two north Queensland species occur only above 900 m elevation.
Not much longer than a ten-cent coin but a bright mustard yellowish colour with bright red patches hidden behind the legs, the Whirring Tree Frogs are similar in appearance and differ subtly in their mating calls. Despite the similarity in appearance, their genetic analyses showed that the three species have been separate evolutionary lineages for at least 1.5 million years.
Luke Price the senior author of the study (University of Newcastle and South Australian Museum) observed that the unusual distribution and genetic divergence between the species “provides important information about Australia’s climate in the past and how that has moulded the current distribution of the frog”. He postulated that because the Whirring Tree Frog occurs only in wet forest habitats “it must once have occupied wet forest habitats that were interconnected along the Great Dividing Range from north-eastern NSW to the Atherton Tablelands at a time of cooler and moister climate than we experience at present. We are not talking about Climate warming associated with human impacts and the greenhouse effect, but much older changes associated with movement of the continents and global weather circulation.”
Unfortunately, the conservation status of the two northern species is challenging. The newly recognised species at Eungella has a total distribution of less than 15 square kilometres, earning it an unenvious place among the top ten Australian Frogs with the smallest natural range. Unenvious because narrow range is commonly associated with a high threat of extinction. Luke said, “one natural disaster such as a wildfire could wipe out a species found in a small area, or one pollution event could mean the end of a species” Furthermore “the observation that the species is restricted to an isolated patch of high elevation cool rainforest habitat suggests that it is already living at its biological limits, and with climate warming the species has nowhere to expand or migrate”. A similar situation occurs for the Atherton species, but it has a slightly larger distribution.
Because of their narrow range and distribution that is restricted to high elevation, with identifiable threats (climate change warming) to their long-term persistence, the northern two species are assessed as meeting the criteria for “critically endangered” under the threat assessment process of International Union for Conservation of Nature. Fortunately, the scenario for the NSW species is that there is no evidence of threats causing a decline in range or abundance. Although Luke observed that this may be more because "there is no formal surveillance for this species and his assessment that it is not threatened is based on observations from interested biologists and community scientists only”.
For more details on the paper, feel free to contact the author below:
Contact: Michael Mahony
Phone: 0429636152
See the abstract for the paper below:
Zootaxa 5584 (3): 301–338
https://www.mapress.com/zt/ Copyright © 2025 Magnolia Press
Article
ISSN 1175-5326 (print edition)
ZOOTAXA
ISSN 1175-5334 (online edition)
Systematic evaluation of molecular genetic, morphological and acoustic variation reveals three species in the Litoria revelata complex (Anura: Pelodryadidae)
LUKE C. PRICE1, CONRAD J. HOSKIN2, MICHAEL J. MAHONY3 & STEPHEN C. DONNELLAN4,5*
1School of Biological Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005 Australia
2College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, 4811Australia
3School of Environmental and Life Sciences, The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, 2308, Australia
4South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, 5000, Australia
5Australian Museum Research Institute, Australian Museum, 1 William St, Sydney 2010, Australia
*Corresponding author: � steve.donnellan.museum@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5448-3226
Abstract
We used a combination of nuclear and mitochondrial genetic data, body measurements and colouration, and male advertisement calls to analyse the systematic implications of variation in the whirring treefrog Litoria revelata complex, which occurs in three allopatric populations—north-eastern New South Wales/south-eastern Queensland, mid-eastern Queensland, and northern Queensland. The three populations each form divergent lineages for both the nuclear (single nucleotide polymorphisms; SNP) and mitochondrial datasets and are diagnosable also on the basis of morphology and advertisement calls. In combination, we use these lines of data to recognise three species: L. revelata in north-eastern New South Wales/south eastern Queensland, L. eungellensis sp. nov. in mid-eastern Queensland, and the resurrected L. corbeni in northern Queensland. We provide a preliminary conservation assessment for each species, with the latter two species being localised to very small upland areas and warranting conservation listing and attention.
Key words: Anura, single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNP, taxonomy, Eungella, Wet Tropics
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