The Yellow Dyer Tink Frog (Diasporus citrinobapheus) is a small Eleutherodactyline frog found in the uplands of Panama. It gets its unusual name from its "tink-like" call as well as the fact that when handled, this species will stain your skin yellow. Here's a photo showing one of our team member's fingers after handling this frog in the photo.
The purpose of this yellow dyeing is not known, but it is postulated to have some defensive mechanism. Although the yellow skin secretion does not contain any alkaloids, it is presumed to have a bad taste which might discourage predators (Hertz, et al., 2012). There are also other species of Diastema that can dye the skin like this but this species appears to do it more than other species.
We found and heard this frog in the Anton Valley of Central Panama in June 2024. I made a recording of some other frog species at this location and wasn't sure what the higher pitched tink in my recording was. There was a prominent Common Tink Frog (Diasporus diastema) in the foreground, but the other higher tink call was a mystery. The Common Tink Frog is the louder upward slurred "tink" heard in this recording. The Yellow Dyer Tink Frog is the higher pitched "tink" heard above the Common.
Both species of Tink Frogs together
After cleaning the recording up to remove the people talking and the Diasporus diastema calls, we can hear the higher pitched "tink" more clearly. This is the Yellow Dyer Tink Frog calling.
The call of this species is a high pitched "peep" (maybe "tink"?) in the 3.3 to 3.7kHz frequency, noticeable higher and less upward slurred than D. diastema (23.5 to 29.5 kHz).
Yellow Dyer Tink Frog (Diasporus citrinobapheus) calling alone.
So once again, I scored another "research frog" to my lifelist by listening back to my recordings and finding a match!
This will make this my 130th frog species recorded!
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© Chris Harrison 2024
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