Have you turned a rock today?

Posted on September 2, 2007 by | 6 Comments

rock%20flipping%20badge.jpgRemember? Today is the Rock Flipping day!
It’s so dry and hot here, it is even dry and hot under the rocks in the woods. It took my daughter and me a long time flipping rocks to detect any sign of life and then it would be just a couple of ants quickly scurrying away, too fast to take a picture. Then we went down to the pond – and nothing there either, it’s THAT dry! Finally, we gave up and said, OK, just one more rock. And that’s where we found this frog. My camera cannot really do the close-up photography needed for this. I hope that someone here can still be able to recognize the species and play with binomial nomenclature in italicized Latin in the comments.
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6 responses to “Have you turned a rock today?”

  1. Leah's avatar Leah | September 2, 2007 at 6:54 pm |

    I feel like I should rise to the challenge here, since I’m ostensibly a herpetologist. I wish you had some further away but less fuzzy pics of the frog.
    Let’s start with this — I’m 99% sure it’s a frog and not a toad (well, a toad is a frog, but you know what I mean).
    What was the size scale on this?
    I’m pretty sure your frog is in family Ranidae. I wish I had a good look at the face markings. Maybe it’d be best if you looked at pics yourself: Frogs of North Carolina is a great website with decent pictures of each species. I don’t feel quite comfortable venturing a guess, since I’m not familiar with each frog species. It vaguely looks like Rana sylvatica to me, but it’s greener than the sylvaticas we get up in Michigan. Did it have a little dark mask around the eyes? We call Rana sylvatica the “bandit of the woods.”

  2. coturnix's avatar coturnix | September 2, 2007 at 7:05 pm |

    If I go by the images from that site, it is Rana utricularia.

  3. coturnix's avatar coturnix | September 2, 2007 at 7:11 pm |

    Except that it was only about 1.5 inches long – a small specimen. But the markings are right on.

  4. Ken Hirsch's avatar Ken Hirsch | September 2, 2007 at 8:08 pm |

    Based on location, it’s probably a Scroggs Frog.

  6. Leah's avatar Leah | September 3, 2007 at 3:41 am |

    The small size could easily indicate that you have a metamorph (recently metamorphosed frog). I’m not familiar with the species . . . but bulls and greens are still metamorphosing out, and they don’t come out too large. Definitely possible that your little guy was a recent metamorph. Hope he does alright in the dry weather.