I need to start this post by saying that Roth’s Tree Frogs have gorgeous eyeballs! Their eyeballs are so amazing that they inspired an entire post about frog eyeballs, which you should definitely read first. You can find it here.

Roth’s Tree Frog is found across Australia’s Top End, as well as southern Papua New Guinea, and aside from having the BEST eyeballs, it also has a rather unique call.

This frog is sometimes called the Northern Laughing Tree Frog, because when trying to attract a mate, it emits a hilarious cackle – presumably laughing at the absurdity of its own existence.

If you want to hear its ridiculous chuckle without needing to go outside, you should download the FrogID app and contribute to citizen frog science at the same time. (I’d also recommend going outside and looking for frogs, it’s great fun.)

FrogID is a project run by the Australian Museum that allows you to identify frogs that you come across and upload their calls to a nationwide database. This information helps the team of frog experts at the museum to broaden their knowledge about frog distributions, populations and habitats, and potentially even add to the almost 250 species of frog that call Australia home.

Since it launched in 2017, the app has had over 300,000 submissions from 22,000 citizen scientists. If you’ve always wanted to learn more about frogs but didn’t know where to start – downloading the FrogID app is a great place to begin!

Head to frogID.net.au to find out more.

Speaking of frog science, in researching this post I also came across a paper entitled ‘Acoustic Classification of Frog Calls’ from a group of scientists that were using machine learning to train computers to identify frogs by their calls – and one of the species they were using was Roth’s Tree Frog.

With all the fear around artificial intelligence and computers taking over the world, it’s nice to consider that maybe the robots will just want to go out and look for frogs when we inevitably reach the singularity. Fingers crossed.

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Roth’s Tree Frog (Litoria rothii), Robin Falls, Australia