Dr Mark D. Scherz

A little green tree frog delicately spotted with red, sitting on a fern frond and singing into the night. Dozens of others nearby sing the same song, and females are hard to come by.

My team and I have spent a few days in the rainforest of Ranomafana National Park on our way east to the littoral forest south of Farafangana called Agnalazaha. It’s been dry here, but we were happy to find a few calling frogs, like this beautiful male Boophis tasymena. 🧪🐸

Rainy Malagasy landscape through the windshield of a car with the wipers going.

Yes indeed! A few km away from Ranomafana now, and it’s just started to rain

A Malagasy landscape, with pines in shadow in the foreground and a hill with exposed rock in the distance

We are on the road now headed south, making our way towards Ranomafana. We expect the drive to take around 14 hours on rough roads, but we have good company and fantastic weather, despite the cyclone that passed just yesterday. 🇲🇬

A panther chameleon in grey, painted over newspaper? on a corner wall bedecked with barbed wire in Antananarivo. Passing through the chameleon is a yellow and red stripe that’s continuous on the walls before and behind the chameleon. In front and below it sits a small trolly selling Soya Yoghurt with vitamins and calcium in French and Malagasy.

I have a new favourite piece of graffiti. Look at this lovely piece of work in the Ankatso neighbourhood of Antananarivo!

At something like 250 eggs per clutch? Gosh that’s a lot of tadpoles you’re about to have.

Yes there is that as well. They don’t exactly have good looks on their side, in the public perception unfortunately (though I personally find them extremely handsome)

Agreed. The hat-trick of intentionality, high level of documentation from day 1, and catastrophic, cascading, continuing consequences is hard to beat.

I think they used to have them in the Asian market that was/is at the end of SBB

Two.

Snowy Denmark with yours truly in the centre wearing an orange winter jacket, a red scarf, a green hat, a backpack, and a few other small bags. Not exactly appropriate clothing for the 28°C that await me in Antananarivo.

Setting off for seven weeks of Madagascar fieldwork through 20-30 cm of snow is a somewhat surreal experience. Excited to undertake this work as part of my ERC project GEMINI, aiming to sample several miniaturised species to produce some high-quality genomes!

Mine is already on its way

Snow. So much snow. It’s blizzarding in Denmark. No frogs here.

Meanwhile in Denmark

#Spawnwatch... the pond is still a muddy mess due to incessant rain, but 43 frogs counted this morning and now at 5 clumps of spawn. Turn volume up to hear frogs (as ever, traffic too).

Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis in life, subadult paratype.

#NewSpecies!
New tree toad from #tanzania just snuck in:

Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis

Treatment: treatment.plazi.org/id/D439CBA5-...
Publication: doi.org/10.3897/vz.7...
#VertebrateZoology #NectophrynoidesLuhomeroensis

#FAIRdata
#biodiversity #nature #conservation #herps #amphibia #frogs #toads

My hiking boots covered in snow, with snow covering the ground. These same boots will see the rainforest and littoral forests of Madagascar for the next two months.

Copenhagen is in the midst of a blizzard right now, but in three days I will be landing in Antananarivo, where the daytime temperature is 28°C. Hard to conceptualise from where I’m standing. But I’m excited to return to Madagascar on what promises to be a thrilling expedition!

By virtue of being more world-weary, I find. And snowed under. Good lord.

This happens to me, too, unless I make a conscious effort to learn them.

More bang for your bung!

The struggle is real!

Sadly we’re currently seeing unprecedented numbers of loggerheads wash up on beaches across the northeast Atlantic in the winter. 4 in Denmark this year, and many more in countries with longer coastlines. Even overcoming the sex determination problem, changes in currents may kill many young turtles

Abstracts & Awards - SMBE 2026 - Copenhagen Denmark SMBE 2026 Abstract Submission abstract Submitting an abstract Here is an overview of the abstract submission.  Length and words: The abstract must be submitted in English and should be less than 250 words long. It is possible to add images. Presentation types: During the abstract submission you must choose your preferred presentation type. Please note […]

The SMBE 2026 Conference will be in Copenhagen, 28 June - 2 July. Abstracts are due by 3 February 2026. Details: https://smbe2026.org/abstracts/

Organizing committee, Tom Gilbert #conference

There should be a one-month moratorium on new work. Just give everyone the month of February to do the things they are already doing. Nothing new. No additional projects. No new initiatives. No requests. Any email asking someone to do something is automatically rejected and replaced with a cat gif.

Glass is an important aspect of specimen storage in most major natural history collections 🫙

By observing specimens housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, this study outlines the impact of glass deterioration on their preservation:

doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.3.173156

We explored the bioacoustic differentiation of these frogs, and found clear differences among basically all species, especially those co-occurring at the same elevation. This figure shows cut-outs of a the little whistling calls each frog species makes, and a plot of call duration against dominant frequency for all individual calls recorded, coloured by species.

There is an interesting pattern of both size diversity and elevational distribution among the Stumpffia of Montagne d'Ambre in the north of Madagascar. This plate shows dorsal, ventral, and lateral photos of all species, as well as their body size ranges, and then also a plot of elevational distributions of each species, showing clear stratification. All of the frogs are pretty round and shows some indication of miniaturisation. Most are resplendent in a variety of brown shades above and below, but some, like Stumpffia madagascariensis, have stark colour contrasts or lines, and one, S. megsoni, has orange on the belly.

A photo into the forest at moderately high elevation on Montagne d'Ambre. There is a rather open understory, with tree ferns and low bamboo(?), and quite thin tree trunks. It is a sea of greens and browns.

The tiny Stumpffia madagascariensis upon a bright green leaf in the leaflitter. This species is one of the smallest frogs in Madagascar, and indeed the world. This individual has a thin light stripe along the back, a pale brown dorsum, and stark black border along the flank. You can just make out the teensy tiny toesies, and it is, frankly, adorable.

New publication from my lab, led by @njorisfleck.bsky.social! 🧪 We explore the diversity and origins of a genus of tiny frogs 🐸 on an isolated mountain in north Madagascar. A cool case study of both in-situ diversification and repeated colonisation!
vertebrate-zoology.arphahub.com/article/1664...

A pink glow over a green glow in a light-polluted night sky over a residential area, with a playground and a tree in the middle foreground. The composition is shite and the aurora itself is pathetically pale, but it’s there!

At long last I finally managed to catch the northern lights! From home, no less! My first unsuccessful attempts scuppered by cloud were some 15 years ago, and I have had few chances to see them since.

Head canon that the Silverstein of ‘Plate Tectonics’ is Shel Silverstein of ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ fame, and the whole book is whimsical poems about geology

Our new paper is out! By reconstructing 320 million years of reptile body armour evolution, we settled a century-old debate. Along the way, we found that monitor lizards broke Dollo’s Law in an unparalleled comeback. Check out our article in The Conversation for more: doi.org/10.64628/AA....

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

How not to describe a species: lessons from a tangle of anacondas (Boidae: Eunectes Wagler, 1830) Abstract. A recent revision of the anacondas (Serpentes: Boidae: Eunectes), with the description of a new species of green anaconda, generated extensive pu

This was a disaster of a 'discovery', unfortunately, and the 'new species' is not valid for a huge number of reasons.
See academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

I am all about this. We must stop dumbing everything down for kids. They love this shit.

You might want to just say that an organism might have many common names, but it (usually) only has one valid scientific name, which is therefore consistent no matter what language you speak and thus superior