Male Darwin's Frog coughs up babies

For an endangered species of frog, the regurgitation of 10 babies is exciting news. Add to it that the male is handling the initial rearing, and ow the story gets even more interesting. From MSNBC.com:

The vulnerable species is one of two members of the only genus on Earth that rears its young inside of its vocal sac, a job taken on by the males. "They have a small opening below their tongue. … After [the eggs] hatch, he takes the tadpoles into his mouth and manipulates them through that opening and into his vocal sac," Danté Fenolio, a conservation scientist with the Atlanta Botanical Garden, explained to me today. "For about 60 days, they go all the way through to development inside his vocal sac. At that point when they are ready, fully developed, he coughs up fully formed miniatures of the adult." Fenolio is working on a captive breeding project with the National Zoo and Universidad Catolica in Santiago to build a so-called assurance population of the frogs that can be released into the wild once, or if, environmental threats to their natural habitat are thwarted.

These frogs are being captive bred and working toward an assurance colony. But as Fenolio points out, assurance colonies just buy time, not save the species. To read the full article, click here.