A New Species in New York Was Croaking in Plain Sight

By Lisa W. Foderaro

New York City - The croak gave it away.

On a foray into the wilds of Staten Island in 2009, Jeremy A. Feinberg, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolution at Rutgers University, heard something strange as he listened for the distinctive mating call of the southern leopard frog — usually a repetitive chuckle. But this was a single cluck.

“I started hearing these calls, and I realized they were really distinct,” Mr. Feinberg said.

Three years later, Mr. Feinberg and four other scientists who joined him in multiple field and laboratory studies, are finally comfortable making their declaration: a new species of leopard frog — as yet unnamed — has been identified in New York City and a number of surrounding counties.

The find is surprising on a number of fronts, not least of which is that the new frog was hiding in plain sight in one of the most populated centers in the world. (Most new species are found in remote areas.) And it illustrates the power of genetic testing in parsing more finely those animals that may be nearly identical in appearance, but are, in fact, of different species.

There are more than a dozen leopard frogs, ranging from Canada to Central America. Medium in size, with dark spots on a tan, olive or green background, they gravitate toward grassy meadows and breed in ponds or pools. The researchers say that the new frog species was confused for a long time with the southern leopard frog, which it closely resembles.

Its known range is limited, more or less, to commuting distance from Midtown Manhattan, stretching from around Trenton, N.J., in the south, to Putnam County, N.Y., to the north.

“Here is a brand-new species, and it’s not a species of bacteria or a barely visible insect,” said H. Bradley Shaffer, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It’s a big amphibian, and kids have probably been catching and playing with it for years,” he said. “Even in an urban center like New York, where herpetologists have tromped all over for a century or more, there can be new species out there. That shows the importance of urban areas in terms of conservation and biodiversity.”

The findings are to be published in an issue of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, but are currently available online. Much of the genetic analysis was performed in Professor Shaffer’s laboratory at the University of California at Davis, where he worked until recently.

There, with his encouragement, Catherine E. Newman, an evolutionary biologist who had done her master’s thesis on the southern leopard frog, studied the frog’s DNA, taken from samples sent by Mr. Feinberg and others. She compared it with the DNA of southern and northern leopard frogs, which range widely north and south of New York City.

Local amphibian fans can be forgiven for not noticing the new frog’s unique nature. “I wouldn’t know which one I was holding because they all look so similar,” said Ms. Newman, who is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Louisiana State University. “But all of our results showed this one’s lineage is very clearly genetically distinct.”

So far, Mr. Feinberg has positively identified the new species on Staten Island, although he says it probably once inhabited Manhattan and the other boroughs. He has found specimens in the Meadowlands and the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, and Putnam and Orange Counties in New York. Some frogs were also collected in central Connecticut.

“It’s a very small range and even if we went back 400 to 500 years, it probably would have been considered a rare animal,” he said.

The dead center of the known range, oddly, is near Yankee Stadium, even though the frog has not yet been found in the Bronx.

“I think that at this point it’s very important to do additional surveys,” Professor Shaffer said. The frog’s range “may be no wider than we have found or it may be wider.”

Over the years, a few other scientists almost identified the new species, but fell short. In 1936, one esteemed herpetologist wrote that he suspected there was a third frog species in the general New York City area. But he did not investigate further.

In the early 1970s, another scientist went on a listening tour of the various leopard frogs’ mating calls while driving from Florida to the Northeast. “She missed this entire area,” Mr. Feinberg said. “She might have been driving on I-95 and just skipped over the weird call area.”

As the lead author on a second paper that is to explore the physical characteristics and call of the new frog, Mr. Feinberg will have the honor of naming rights, choosing a scientific and common name. For now he’s not letting the frog out of the bag.

“I’ve given it lots of thought,” he said. “Part of me has always wanted to call these New York leopard frogs, but I think people in New Jersey and Connecticut will protest. I have to balance the politics with the naming.”

Facing Painful Cuts and Tuition Hikes, U.S. Students "Occupy Education"

By Judith Scherr

Berkeley, California - Shawn Deez, a freshman in peace and conflict studies, says she thinks she knows why some classes are scheduled at the University of California, Berkeley, and some are not. It's corporate influence that makes the difference, she said.

It was Mar. 1, Occupy Education's National Day of Action, observed with marches and rallies at some 30 California universities and at a number of venues around the country.

While much of the media focused on the steep tuition hikes at state universities and community colleges, many participants at UC Berkeley used the lens of the Occupy Movement - the 99 percent versus the one percent - to examine the underlying problems in education.

Deez spoke to IPS during a downpour while waiting for a noontime rally on the UC Berkeley campus. She contended that the influence of corporations such as BP – formally British Petroleum – which has partnered with the university and its affiliated laboratories on a 400,000-dollar biofuels institute, heavily influences the departments in which university funds are spent. She said the humanities have no corporate funding and face increasing cuts.

Moreover, she said, corporate interests have turned the university away from its mission. 

"The idea of careerism has taken over the university," she said. "There's no idea of going to the university any more just for knowledge."

And then there's the question of who profits from the steep tuition hikes. Banks have been frequently targeted by the six-month-old Occupy Movement, for their bad home loans and foreclosures. But University of California, Davis instructor Joshua Clover explained to the Berkeley crowd of around 300 how banks profit from the hike in their tuitions.

"The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people's ability to pay," he said. "Those banks really need you suckers for those loans. The university and banks enter into an alliance through which the banks make staggering profits from the university's huge fee hikes."

After that, the banks control the debtor's lives. "This is the outcome of the university's laying down with capital," he said, telling the students that the answer isn't a "kinder, gentler capitalism", but an end to the system.

Before the rally, "teach-outs" were held in small groupings around the campus. Matt Williams, a senior in sociology, led one on affirmative action. UC Berkeley statistics for 2010 show there were just four percent African American and 13 percent Latino undergraduates.

He said that part of the problem is the different quality of high schools, where some schools offer advanced placement classes in which a student can earn 4.5 points (an A is four points), and where counselors steer students into college preparatory classes and even help students write their entry essays.

Donnell Vital-Gibson, an eleventh grader at Oakland Technical High School, was listening to the speaker on affirmative action and talked to IPS afterward, explaining that he was one of the lucky ones in Oakland. His high school has advanced placement classes, he said, but schools in Oakland's poorer neighbourhoods do not.

"We're fighting the one percent right here," he said.

After the rally, the students took off on a march to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, the former home of Occupy Oakland, to meet up with community college students and others from Occupy Oakland.

Then some 60 among them marched again, heading to a church in Richmond, about 12 miles away, where they would join students from San Francisco, spend the night at a church, then walk 99 miles over several days, to UC Davis, near the state capitol in Sacramento.

They are planning "Occupy the capitol," a statewide education rally in Sacramento Mar. 5.

"The march is a way to engage the community," said Stephan Georgiou, a student at San Francisco City College, a community college where 67 classes were cut this year. Georgiou said they're facing the "dismantling of community colleges in California," and that people are not aware of the programme cuts and layoffs.

He said some legislators are trying to "take the autonomy away from the colleges and turn them into vocational schools."

Around the time Georgiou was marching from Oakland to Richmond, 13 demonstrators were arrested in San Francisco for refusing to leave a state office building until their demands for education funding were met. A City College engineering instructor was among the arrestees.

Around 3 p.m., another rally was held in Berkeley. This one, at the K-12 school administration building, was put together by Occupy Berkeley High and attended by some 600 students, whose signs and t- shirts said: "Wake up! Stand up! Speak up! Shake up! We are the 99 percent. Tax the rich."

The "tax the rich" refers to a proposed "millionaires tax" that will be on California's November ballot, if its supporters collect the required signatures. It would levy an additional state income tax of three percent for Californians whose annual adjusted gross income is over one million dollars, and five percent for those making over two million dollars a year.

The funds would restore budget cuts to education, public safety, and other services. The California Federation of Teachers is backing this measure.

Berkeley High senior Amelia McCrea spoke to the crowd, calling for the millionaire's tax and asking: "Doesn't the government realise that someday, we're going to be running the show?

"We are the future innovators, artists, politicians, shapers of the world and we are the ones who supply the hunger for knowledge and drive to learn. We must show the state, the country, that we won't sit idly by while education is being undervalued."

McCrea continued, "I believe that students should be recognised as a priority over the funding of prisons," and then she invited the audience to enjoy the dance performances and music provided by fellow students. 

Kepler Telescope Finds Two Earth-sized Planets

New York – Two Earth-sized planets were discovered by scientists orbiting a star 950 light-years outside our solar system.

The news brings many things to light. One is planets from such a distance away are able to be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, NASA's telescope which currently found several dozens of Earth-sized planets. Another is the possibility of life being present on the planet. Third is the features of the planet. So far the planets, named Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, possess a radius .87 times and 1.03 times our planet respectively. Both seem to be rocky and are the smallest of such planets orbiting a sun like ours found so far. Kepler-20e has a six Earth-day orbit, Kepler-20f orbits its star with a 20-day orbit. Nature magazine states neither of them are in what's called “the habitable zone,” nor do they spin on their axes. The scientists have yet to work out the planets' densities, which will be done with instruments like the HARPS-North radial-velocity spectrometer in the Canary Islands. It will be revealed around April of 2012

Despite this news however, presently humans would not be able to survive on either planet even if we were able to travel there in a relatively short period of time due to their temperatures. Kepler-20e is estimated to be 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and 20f reaches 800.

This news comes on the heels of another planet found with a surface more friendly to us, roughly about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, but too large to suggest life exists on its surface. That planet is estimated to be 2.4 times the size of Earth and possibly more like Neptune than Earth.

“Kepler can do things that no other telescope can do,” says Jonathan Fortney, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He states the fact the two planets are sandwiched between three larger planets spanning a size spectrum from “super-Earths” to “mini-Neptunes” makes them strange finds. David Charbonneau, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center astronomer and co-author of the paper, stated “Different-sized planets do not mingle in [our] solar system, but apparently in this system they do.”

Update: Astronomers believe the planets were once gas giants that were stripped down after being swallowed by their swollen, aging parent.  They also say they "are sure there is no life on these planets."