Microhylidae

Pale to golden brown above, usually with darker brown flecks or blotches often with a paler or darker narrow, hair-line vertebral stripe, sometimes finely dotted with white above

Nocturnal

NT. Ground litter associated with monsoon forests , streams and soaks in savannah woodland

Formerly Sphenophryne adelphe

Breeding Case Study from Ian Morris It all came about as I had a visit from Rob Morgan of the Qld Frog Soc. who was up here filming frogs calling for a project he is doing with Dave Stewart of Bris (makes Aussie frog call CDs). He wanted to film a male Sphenophryne calling. Jeremy Russell-Smith has a population in his garden (Cox Pen Rd, Berry Springs) & I figured that they would be the easiest ones to work on. We triangulated a calling male & low & behold he was in the company of a female. After filming (28/1) we carefully re-covered the litter over the frogs & left them to it. 13 days later (10/02) I suggested we have a look in the same spot, just on the off chance, & sure enough, there were the eggs & one parent. 12 un-pigmented eggs which were approx. three times greater in mass than the female herself. The parent turned out to be the male! He stayed tight on the eggs, no matter what we did. The eggs were in a small depression approx. 2 cm in depth with the parent crouched beside. This was covered by a layer of moist decaying leaf litter. On exposure to the light, the parent tunnelled under the eggs, but emerged again later. He clearly did not want to leave the eggs. The female probably goes off to other calling males & produces more eggs at their chosen locations. It would now be nice to know just how many clutches each female can produce in a season. She may be covering a lot of ground! I transferred the eggs, adult male & substrate to an aquarium so I could monitor the development. During the following days, I had to work out bush, so they joined me in the field. The whitish eggs (12) each had two eye dots visible on the day we found them & I estimate that they were 8-10 days old. Development was rapid. Within a few days the eggs were opaque & the clearly visible embryos were quite active inside, gyrating regularly. On 18/02 some of the embryos were pushing vigorously at the membranes with their forearms & on the morning of 19/02 one froglet was partially out & breathing. Most of the others were pushing at their membranes. By the following morning all eggs had hatched into little replicas of the adult frog (no sign of tails). The hatchlings remained at the nest site for a few days & then dispersed individually. The male had abandoned the eggs & gone off calling on 16/02, but that may have been as a result of my regular inspections. My estimation of egg life is approx. 20 days, which is a considerable advantage on the average tadpole turnout.

Kakadu National Park