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| Boana platanera photo by Mateo Garcia Mejía Used under Creative Commons license granted in this iNaturalist record |
This recording was part of an all night recording I made at a pond at the edge of the Piedras Blancas National Park in southern Costa Rica.
Boana platanera calling from Piedras Blancas National Park, Costa Rica
After I made this recording, I was a bit confused as to the identity of this frog. I knew it didn't sound like the locally common Boana rosenbergi and I couldn't figure out what other species could sound like this. So I did some searching using online sources like xeno-canto.org, iNaturalist.org, Fonozoo.com and found the most similar call I could and found a recording of Boana crepitans which sounded similar. Of course, that species doesn't occur in Central America (it is restricted to the Atlantic Coast of Brazil). So that led me to a taxonomic hunt using Amphibian Species of the World to find what the closest relative to B. crepitans would be in Costa Rica. That led me to Boana xerophylla which eventually led me to this paper which described a new species B. platanera based on specimens from the northern part of the range of B. xerophylla.
Unfortunately, that paper described the as occurring in Trinidad and
Tobago, Venezuela (north of the Orinoco River), northwestern Colombia
and into Central Panama. But the species did not make it into Costa Rica. iNaturalist had this record from David in northern Panama which is only 50 miles from where my recording was made (although some have questioned that ID). So I had to dive into the paper to see if this could be the species in question.
Fortunately, the paper had descriptions of the call and waveform diagrams which matched my recording almost perfectly based their two "phases", the number of parts to the call, the timing of each part and their general description of the call.
Boana platanera calling from Piedras Blancas National Park, Costa Rica
I have subsquently listened to all the available recordings for this species on iNaturalist and they sound similar enough to confirm my identification (to me?). I can not find another species that could make a similar call that is in range.
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© Chris Harrison 2024
Escalona Sulbarán, M., E. La Marca, M. C. Castellanos-Montero, A. Fouquet, A. J. Crawford, F. J. M. Rojas-Runjaic, A. A. Giaretta, J. C. Señaris, and S. Castroviejo-Fisher. 2021. Integrative taxonomy reveals a new but common Neotropical treefrog, hidden under the name Boana xerophylla. Zootaxa 4981: 401–448 (https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4981.3.1).
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