Distribution and Habitat

Country distribution from AmphibiaWeb's database: Botswana, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, United Republic of, Zambia, Zimbabwe

	View distribution map in BerkeleyMapper.
	View Bd and Bsal data (2 records).

Comments
This species was featured in News of Week 2 September 2024:

To date, research on defense mechanisms have largely centered on molecules that function as toxins, but recently Zaman et al. (2024) has pivoted to a far more obscure (and much less understood) defense mechanism: glue. When attacked by a predator, a small number of frog and salamander species discharge a highly viscous fluid from their skin which rapidly turns into an adhesive - or glue - under applied pressure (such as that exerted by a predator’s bite), effectively preventing their ingestion. Glue as an antipredator defense adaptation has evolved sporadically in phylogenetically distant taxa. Here, the authors demonstrate that species belonging to at least two different frog families - the Madagascan Tomato frog (Dyscophus guineti, Microhylidae) and the Mozambique Rain frog (Breviceps mossambicus, Brevicipitidae) - have independently recruited the same pre-existing proteins for glue formation, followed by parallel shifts in the expression of their underlying genes. This study reveals how a series of structural and regulatory changes to ancient, near ubiquitous proteins can propel the recurrent evolution of a remarkable functional innovation. (Written by Jim McGuire)

References
Phaka, F.M., Netherlands, E.C., Kruger, D.J.D., Du Preez, L.H. (2019). Folk taxonomy and indigenous names for frogs in Zululand, South Africa. J Ethnobiology Ethnomedicine 15, 17. [link]

Species Account Citation: AmphibiaWeb 2024 Breviceps mossambicus: Mozambique Rain Frog <https://amphibiaweb.org/species/2378> University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Accessed Nov 12, 2024.

Citation: AmphibiaWeb. 2024. <https://amphibiaweb.org> University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Accessed 12 Nov 2024.

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