Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis
This frog is a living fossil. It seems it might have split up from other frogs about 150 million years ago and has not changed much since than. There are no close relatives in terms of species for this frog and the nearest one is in the Seychelles islands. It feels like a big bag of jelly when you hold it in your hand and I must say, its a very strong frog.
We managed to find few pairs of the Purple frogs and we filmed/photographed them from many angles. I think we might be the first ones to have filmed this frog.
The Purple frog in the forest undergrowth
However, to make it a good sequence, we needed some action/behavior from the frogs. We have been trying to get the frogs turned on, and get on with what they came out of the ground for. But they just don’t seem to be in the mood. We tried giving them a comfortable and romantic room (read lot of mud and rain), we tried romantic music (read loud male frog calls from the speakers) and we even tried turning the lights out (read night time), but the male and female just don’t seem to be interested. They usually mate and lay their eggs within a week and head back into the ground.
With the monsoon acting all funny, the frogs are quite confused too. They have been coming out for every small shower thinking its the monsoon and have been borrowing themselves back in the ground once the rains stopped. We are still on a standby here, just in case the frogs do come out and decide to mate now.
Filming them has not been easy. We were mostly filming in heavy rain in middle of the jungle. That meant at any point of time, we had hundreds of leeches on each of us and we could not remove them either as we were busy filming all along.
In the meantime, we did manage to get some good footage of snakes, landscapes and the endangered Lion-tailed macaque.
Leeches
Apply some lemon juice to prevent leeches on you…
heard this tip recently.
hope this helps
keep it up
dude i am really bowled over by the amount of dedication that you guys are filming – keep the enthu and spirit going
btw …
“It feels like a big bag of jelly when you hold it in your hand”
SK>> are they not venemous — i am ignorant but the skin colour makes me feel so
Re: Leeches
Yes it does help, but that does not stay for long in the rain, so its not really practical.
how do they burrow ? i mean with the jellylike smooth exterior
WoW amazing looking creature!
They have razor type back toes which they use to dig themselves. They always go back in backwards.
Re: keep it up
None of the frogs in India have venom on their skins. Its only the poison dart frog from amazon which has that.
Re: Leeches
Exactly, esp when you are sitting or sometimes even crawling on the ground.
Re: TN’s own Gollum
No clue.. and this frog has not been studied much still either.
woow ! an image with that behaviour would be fantastic 🙂
that is such a cute looking thing.. nice write up kalyan..
i never new that u’re a sexologist too!!
The thing *looks* primitive! Any pics of the Lion-tailed macaque?
Re: TN’s own Gollum
Maybe your team can pick up were Gladwyn Noble left off. I am just in awe that someone first described them pre 1940’s. Yet there is so lil’ material about them. Best wishes.
Great pics.. Its got a funny snout for a frog..
Good luck with the leeches
Named after the Sahyadris?
How is their movement like ? Very very slow ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasikabatrachidae
Most likely 🙂
which place?
where exactly you shot this in Valparai? is it around Solaiyar?
Amazing pics as always dude!
Re: which place?
It was near the Shankaran Kudi tribal settelment.
No, they are very fast actually. You will have to wait for the documentary to see that 🙂
Ah.. I hope you guys have one full episode on this 🙂
Most new species are being found by Indians and they are naming most of them with the place where it was found.
Loads of them 🙂 I’ll post them soon.
Re: TN’s own Gollum
Actually this was only described in 2003 🙂
The name purple frog doesn’t match the color of the frog (as in the image).
Is its actual color?
-Ganesh
So any chances of them resurfacing?
Nice writeup kalyan was just wondering …wht do they feed on normaly when they are underground ? How do they breath ?
-Anjali
Wow! great show….
bad usericon!
Most excellent
Bravo! Excellent work. I envy your experiences!
Bart
you should add the pics on wikipedia =)
Where do you find these critters?
So my question is, where exactly do you go to find these frogs? Is there a particular town/forest/national park/village where they congregate? I assume you guys (or Sandesh) has a place in mind where these critter congregate. Would the average person be able to find these? Do villagers know that these are around? Do kids use these to scare away bullies? (kidding on the last one)
Oh by the way, do you shoot in RAW or JPEG?
Kiran
Re: Where do you find these critters?
I see you already addressed this above, my bad, but wondering if you shoot in RAW or JPEG…
Pretty amazing pictures, first time I have ever seen such a smooth-skinned frog, and that too, this colour, and with eyes that are much smaller than one associates with the general idea of frogs.
Really liked your account of playing Cupid to these frogs..oh, you voyeurs, you will do anything to document frog porn! But by now you must have got a lot of footage on their other habits, I guess.
Leeches…now that’s one part of Nature that I really can’t bring myself to view without loathing…hope you have got them all off…and that the village has a good supply of lemons, or kerosene, or salt, or whatever…I think commitment is when you have a hundred leeches on you, and yet you carry on filming!
This time in Bandipur, I met Sunil, who used to be with JLR, and who is presently doing research on the lion-tailed macaque in the upper reaches of the Sharavathi valley…have you met him recently?
Re: Where do you find these critters?
Kiran, most committed photographers (not just wildlife photographers) shoot in RAW, as that allows them a lot of leeway with post-processing. If you find someone taking pictures in jpeg, you can be sure that they are…er..very “amateur” photographers, shooting more for their own documentation.
And..I don’t know what the formats for videography are.
eeeek
thats one ugly son of a bitch …
pictures for Wikipedia
Any chance you’d be interested in donating one of your pictures to Wikipedia to document the Purple frog for posterity. Right now, Wikipedia only has a rather poor copyrighted image that is being used under “fair use”. Fair use images are generally frowned upon on Wikipedia in favor of Creative Commons licenced images or public domain images. Anyway, just thought I’d ask 🙂
Re: Where do you find these critters?
I have to disagree with that assertion, b/c in a way, shooting with slide film, medium format, large format (e.g. Ansel Adams) is no different than JPEG or even RAW to an extent. Think about it, when you shoot slides, what you shoot is what you get, simple as that. I shoot a lot in JPEG, and yes I’d consider myself an amateur, no pro as I don’t make money from my work. But I also like the idea of shooting what you saw, and limiting manipulation to the physical mechanics of the light.
This is a slippery slope argument, and can go on for a long time, b/c essentially whatever you shoot, no matter what the format, digital or not, is all an interpretation of what you want to present, and how you want to present it, documentation or not. One man’s trash is another’s treasure right?
Now, I’m not saying I don’t like RAW, but it is time consuming to post process, and not having had time to sit down and learn it right, which I should, I probably could easily pick it up. I was simply curious b/c I always notice a particular quality to Kalyan’s photos, that I hadn’t seen with other photographers using similar setups (70-200 2.8 and the 200-400 f4 Nikon lenses). Sometimes he throws a teleconverter on there, and some would argue that degrades quality, but I see no change in his photos, but I was suspecting post processing and yes, I would suspect he’d use RAW.
Kiran
Re: Where do you find these critters?
Almost all my photos are shot in RAW (unless when I’m shooting time-lapse stuff for a video). Not that I think its ‘better’ than good quality JPG, but just that it gives lot more freedom in case you goofup (in wildlife, not everything is in your control) and when you are trying to sell/distribute your pics, RAW is always needed. Also many companies insist the RAW file to prove that you have not manuplated the pics, which one cannot tell from the JPG file.
Re: pictures for Wikipedia
Oh, am absolutely fine with using all my pics on Wikipedia. Some of them are already there in bunch of articles. I just don’t find enough time these days to put it up there. I should just atleast dump all my pics one of these days on wikicommons and hopefully someone will take it up from there.
Re: Where do you find these critters?
> Also many companies insist the RAW file to prove that you have not manuplated the pics, which one cannot tell from the JPG file.
Oh! Is that so? But how does one find out? Does RAW have a documenting kind of feature?
BTW great photo of the giant big frog as my daughter would have said;-)
> I have ever seen such a smooth-skinned frog,
If it was little prettier they could have used it in a skin cream ad;-)
Re: eeeek
Yess!
Re: pictures for Wikipedia
> Fair use images are generally frowned upon on
They are pulling down all fair use images these days. So articles on living persons are mostly devoid of their images. The argument being it is easy to take a photo of a living person. Yeah right!
We have been trying to get the frogs turned on
This is what your life has come to? Trying to turn frogs on? 😛
Beautiful images. Do you have any data on how many of this species exist or are they too reclusive to actually make such estimates? Have the frogs in that part of India been affected by pollution and suffered mutations like elsewhere in the world?
Hi, the frog was only discovered 4 years ago, and not much research has gone into it in the wild. tough to tell, but the call can be heard in many locations (10+). So I would think its doing quite ok.
There are other species of frogs which have shown some mutations. If you are into it, I can send the info over email.
saw this guy in Kung Fu Hustle….cute