Under Borneo Protection Plan, 'Ninja slug' and Lungless Frog were Found

     Conservationists hail success of three-year plan that has resulted in the discovery of 123 new species in the biodiverse rainforest of the 'Heart of Borneo' since the 2007 agreement between Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia.


Colorful "Ninga Slug"

(Photo: Memo Schilthuizen/WWF)

     This green and yellow slug(Ibycus rachelae), dubbed "ninja slug", was discovered on leaves in a mountain forest at altitudes up to 6,233 feet (1,900 meters), where the creature likes to wrap its long tail around its body while it rests. The slug is part of an unusual invertebrate family that uses chalky "love darts" in courtship. The tiny harpoons pierce and inject hormone into mates, and may increase the chances of reproduction.

      The slug sports a tail that's three times the length of its head, which it wraps around its 1.6-inch-long (4 cm) body as if a pet cat. In fact, its discoverers initially planned to name the slug Ibycus felis, after its feline inspiration. Instead, they named it after the girlfriend of one of its discoverers, Menno Schilthuizen of the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity 'Naturalis.'
  
     "The distinction between slugs and snails is not so strict in that part of the tropics, because most of the slugs, including the new one we described, are semi-slugs meaning they still have a shell but the shell is so small that it can't retract its body into it," Schilthuizen told LiveScience.



"The Lungless Frog"

(Photo: David Bickford/National University of Singapore)

     The first lungless frog,  Barbourula kalimantanensis, has been discovered lurking in the jungles in a clear, cold-water stream on the island of Borneo in Indonesia.

     The loss of lungs helped the frogs severely flatten their bodies. This in turn increased the surface area of their skin, which helps them absorb oxygen.

     The researchers conjecture the loss of lungs might be an adaptation to the cold, fast rivers the frogs live in. Such waters naturally have high oxygen content. Also, the frogs would rather sink than float and get carried away in the water, so getting rid of lungs, which behave as flotation devices, would prove helpful.

     "No one thought to open them up — there was no real reason to believe that they could be lungless," said researcher David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. "Because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one specimen in your museum, you don't want to rip it open!"

     The lungless frog, no more than 2 inches long, have proven elusive because they live in cold, fast rivers in remote areas of the rainforests of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Also, they are slippery "and can be surprisingly fast for short bursts," Bickford said. "We had a team of 11 people looking for these frogs and it took us almost two weeks before we found any."
He and his colleagues had no idea this frog would be lungless.

Other Bizzare Organs 

     It appears that the rest of the internal organs in these frogs have shifted position to take up the space once filled by the lungs. "So we had the stomach, spleen and the liver up in the area where lungs are normally found," Bickford said. "Interestingly, we also discovered some abnormal cartilage around the area where the lungs should have been that we are still investigating."

     The loss of lungs has been known to occur two other times in all the creatures with backbones that have waddled onto land across geologic time. Each time this loss has happened in amphibians — in a species of caecilian, a limbless beast resembling an earthworm, and in many species of salamanders. How and why this change evolved in these animals has been long debated, and the new frog could shed light on this curious phenomenon.

     However, even the closest relative of this frog, which dwells in the Philippines, has lungs.