Sri Lanka s Tree Frogs
In 1957, Sri Lankan naturalist Parakrama Kirtisinghe published a monograph titled The Amphibia of Sri Lanka. In it, he recorded the presence of 35 species on the island nation. Over the next three and a half decades, with new species being discovered on a fairly regular basis, this number had swollen to a healthy 53.
Then, in 1993, a field survey began that re-wrote Sri Lanka's natural history. Rohan Pethiyagoda and Kelum Manamendra-Arachchi of the Wildlife Heritage Trust, Sri Lanka, decided to put old research methods behind them (validating museum specimens, or species first written about in the 19th century) and plunge straight into the rainforest. More importantly, they decided to look only above eye-level.
Aided by a wwf Small Grants Trust, they began a systematic survey. Actively peering into trees, the surveyors couldn't believe what they saw and heard - a living collection of frogs that nobody had ever recorded about. Within five years, the number of amphibian species endemic to Sri Lanka leap-frogged to 250.
This happened at a time when the number of such species seemed to be on a decline the world over. Habitat destruction, human activity