Of Frogs and Stars

The limerick’s less than idyllic
And yet there are rules to this lyric.
It needs at all times
Three ridiculous rhymes
And a meter quite smoothly dactylic.

So here, to take up yesterday’s theme, is an astro-amphio-limerick:

By Eridanus River, a star called the Frog
Is at home, when she’s not in a lake or a bog.
She’s Rana in Latin,
But who can fit that in?
You try to be clever, you end in a fog.

The day-before-yesterday’s newspaper had an item to please Madeline and me.  In the misty forest of a “sky island” of Bolivia’s Zongo valley, naturalists have discovered a red frog only a centimeter long,

as well as other previously unknown butterflies, orchids, and a snake with the red, yellow, and green colors of the Bolivian flag.  “You could hear the distinctive call of the little frog throughout the forest, but you get close and they stop calling.  Trying to spot it when it’s not making a sound and is hidden in the moss was a tremendous task.”

A touching part of the story is that another specoes, the devil-eyed frog, had been seen only once, twenty years ago, by Steffen Reichle, a biologist who is based in Bolivia though his name, like that of the expedition leader Trond Larsen, suggests north European background.  The once-seen frog had been presumed extinct.  The expedition not only rediscovered it but found it to be fairly common in this valley.  And Reichle was along on the expedition.

The region is almost inaccessible because the Zongo River flows in one of the fearsome canyons of the high Andes, such as awed me in my hike to Machu Picchu.

Yet it is only thirty miles from Bolivia’s teeming capital, La Paz.  When biological, or archaeological, discoveries like this are made, you have to worry about making the location known.  People go and plunder.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after piblishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.