Amphibians
Hula Painted Frog
Latonia nigriventer · also called hula painted frog, israel painted frog
The Hula painted frog has one of the strangest histories of any animal. It was known from a few specimens, then its wetland was drained, then it was officially declared extinct — the first amphibian ever to get that label. Fifty-five years later a park ranger found one hopping through a marsh in northern Israel. And when scientists looked closely, they realised it was the last living member of a frog genus otherwise known only from fossils.
Overview
The Hula painted frog lives only in the Hula Valley of northern Israel, in dense freshwater marsh. It is 4–7 cm long, stout and soft-skinned, olive to rusty-brown above and dark, nearly black, below with small white spots. It hunts insects, worms, snails, and smaller amphibians in thick wetland vegetation.
Extinct, then not
Described from a handful of specimens found in the 1940s and 1950s, the frog disappeared after the Hula wetlands were drained for farmland and malaria control. In 1996 the IUCN listed it as Extinct. Then, in 2011, a ranger patrolling a re-flooded part of the Hula Nature Reserve found a living one, and follow-up surveys confirmed a small population.
A living fossil
Study of the rediscovered frog’s skeleton and DNA showed it is not a Discoglossus, as first assumed, but the sole survivor of Latonia — a genus previously known only from fossils across Europe, some millions of years old.
Status
The Hula painted frog is Critically Endangered, with only a few dozen to a few hundred individuals recorded in a small area. Its range lies inside a protected reserve, and conservation work centres on maintaining the marsh’s water level and quality and monitoring the population.
Hula Painted Frog: common questions
Why is the Hula painted frog called a living fossil?
Because it turned out to be the last representative of a group thought to have died out long ago. When it was rediscovered in 2011, biologists initially assumed it belonged to Discoglossus, a genus of living painted frogs found around the Mediterranean. But detailed study of its skeleton and its DNA showed it actually belongs to Latonia, a separate genus that scientists had only ever known from fossils, some of them millions of years old, scattered across Europe. So a lineage that the fossil record suggested had vanished was found to have one species still alive in a single Israeli marsh, which is exactly the situation the term living fossil is used to describe.
How was a frog declared extinct and then found alive?
The Hula painted frog was described from just a few specimens collected in the 1940s and 1950s. Shortly afterwards, most of the Hula wetlands were drained for agriculture and disease control, and despite searches no more frogs were found for decades. In 1996 the IUCN formally listed it as Extinct. Then in 2011 a reserve ranger, walking a patrol route in a re-flooded section of the Hula Nature Reserve, spotted and photographed a live one. Targeted surveys afterwards confirmed a small surviving population. Cases like this, where a species reappears after being written off, are sometimes called Lazarus species.
Why did the Hula painted frog nearly disappear?
Habitat destruction on a large scale. The Hula Valley once held an extensive lake and papyrus swamp, but in the 1950s Israel drained almost all of it to create farmland and to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds. That removed essentially the entire habitat of a frog that lives only in dense freshwater marsh, and it is very likely that the species survived through the following decades only in small, overlooked pockets. From the 1990s a portion of the wetland was deliberately re-flooded for conservation and flood management, and it is in that restored marsh that the frog was found again.
What is being done to protect the species now?
The frog's known range lies within the protected Hula Nature Reserve, so the habitat itself has legal protection and active management. Conservation work focuses on maintaining suitable water levels and water quality in the marsh, controlling invasive predators and vegetation, monitoring the population through repeated surveys, and studying the frog's basic biology, which was almost unknown before 2011. Given how tiny and localised the population is, there has also been discussion of establishing a captive assurance colony as a safeguard against a catastrophic loss at the single wild site.