One morning in late April, Research Curator of Herpetology Dr. Bryan Stuart drove to Raleigh-Durham International Airport to pick up an unusual passenger. Seems a live tree frog had become an accidental stowaway in the luggage of a person flying in from Honduras.<\/p>\n
When Stuart met with the U.S. Customs & Border Protection agents who discovered the frog, they happily handed the amphibian over to the herpetologist \u2014 for \u201crehoming\u201d but also hopeful for an accurate identification of the species.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe frog was not a particularly valuable research specimen because it didn\u2019t come with good location information,\u201d Stuart said. \u201cAnd it wouldn\u2019t make a particularly valuable contribution to Living Collections because it wasn\u2019t native to North Carolina or the southeastern U.S.\u201d But Stuart felt compelled to pursue a real ID.<\/p>\n
While his initial guess was that the frog belonged to the genus Smilisca<\/em>, Stuart needed a blood sample to sequence its DNA and make a solid species determination. So he brought it to Chief Veterinarian and Director of Veterinary Sciences Dr. Dan Dombrowski.<\/p>\n After placing the frog under a routine quarantine and health screening, Dombrowski and Coordinator of Veterinary Sciences Shane Christian drew a small blood sample from the frog. Using a DNA sequencer located in the Museum\u2019s Genomics & Microbiology Research Laboratory, Stuart was then able to identify the former stowaway as Smilisca baudinii<\/em>, or common Mexican treefrog.<\/p>\n And now? \u201cThe frog is still alive and well here at the Museum\u2019s Research Lab,\u201d Stuart said. \u201cIt\u2019s a male and occasionally entertains us with very loud calls when the barometric pressure drops from incoming storms.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":112206,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/112205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/112205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalsciences.org\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}