As wildlife filmmakers and photographers, my twin Ajay and I have been on a few near-impossible missions: scouring the Kanchenjunga for the red panda — an elusive animal that looks like a cross between a bear and a raccoon; filming the snow leopard in Ladakh through altitude sickness and frostbite; traversing the Rann of Kutch in temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius for shots of the wild ass. But nothing prepared us for the complexities of our latest project: documenting the life histories of creatures sometimes tinier than a human thumbnail — frogs.
Somewhere hidden in a tiny patch of forest in the Western Ghats (the precise place I cannot reveal, to protect the endangered species) we knew existed one of the world’s oddest and rarest frogs. The Indian purple frog, Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis , is as old as the dinosaur and looks a lot like a glob of jelly. It has a tiny head, a pointed snout like a shrew’s. And it spends most of the year buried underground, emerging on just one day to breed.
When biologist S. Biju discovered the purple frog in 2003, he became an overnight herpetological rockstar. Only a handful of filmmakers and photographers have captured this animal since Biju’s discovery and its life cycle remains a complete mystery even to the scientific world. It is believed that no more than a few hundred of these individual frogs remain.
Last shot
On our first visit a few years ago, we heard male frogs calling, but didn’t see them. The next year, we made it back to the same spot, but the rains failed: these frogs tend to emerge only during pre-monsoon showers. Year three, we decided to give it a last shot.
Close to midnight, cameras in hand, we trudged up to a water stream and waited patiently as the first drops of rain hit the earth in this corner of the Western Ghats. We did this every night for the next 27 nights.
Our beards grew long, our arms progressively more painful from shifting the lens frantically in the direction of a frog call in anticipation of a sighting. And then, it happened.
The calls of the male purple frog grew louder. They expend a lot of energy calling from their burrows: they trap their breath, push out air while contracting their abdomen, and inflate their vocal sacks releasing an amplified twitter. They then emerged, slightly muddy, with the gait of sumo wrestlers ready to take on their opponents. When they began to virtually hand-wrestle, we had to stifle our chuckles. A few hours later, a female made her way out of her subterranean den. She was far bigger, six times heavier. She paired with a male, snacked on termites briefly and then moved 30 to 40 meters upstream to find a suitable site to lay eggs. The incubatory pool has to be just right, and one that stays undisturbed long enough to allow the eggs to hatch. The monsoon will then wash away the emerging tadpoles into the main channel.
We followed the pair, scrambling over rocks and trudging through slush and moist leaf litter, keeping a close watch and safe distance so our filming did not disturb them. Our purple frog finally managed to find a suitable hole and began releasing eggs. The species is an explosive breeder, laying thousands of fertilised eggs, although only few will survive. We were in such disbelief at our good fortune that our hands were literally shaking. This was the first time we would film the entire breeding behaviour of this species that is still an enigma to the scientific world.
Posing and performing
In another nook in the Western Ghats, in India’s most endangered Myristica swamp forests, we went looking for the legendary antics of the torrent frog ( Micrixalus kottigeharensis ) — nicknamed the ‘dancing frog’ by ecologist Gururaja K.V. The swamps here are perennial and perfect for these frogs that are stream-dependent. Said to have evolved 85 million years ago, these inhabitants of torrential streams have evolved a unique repertoire of audio-visual communication to counter the ambient noise.
The torrent frog is known to ‘dance’
Perched on rocks were dozens of dancers, posing and performing what looked distinctly like the tap-dance — complete with foot-flagging, leg-stretches and toe-pointing. Soon a female emerged, almost twice the size of the male, and territorial fights broke out on the rock tops.
But then one night, in the moist deciduous forests of the central Western Ghats, we heard a loud and distinct ‘tok-tok’. We knew it could be only one thing: the kumbara night frog. Its family is one of the three oldest families of frogs in the Western Ghats, dating back to about 90 million years.
The kumbara night frog or Nyctibatrachus kumbara displays something even more human than dancing: it dabbles in a bit of pottery!
The Kumbara night frog uses its fingers to delicately plaster its eggs with mud
This frog collects mud from streams, sometimes standing on two legs, and plasters it on the eggs to pack them in place, using its fingers with great delicacy. While we marvelled at the quiet charisma of these tiny creatures, we were also acutely aware of the threats they face. Amphibians are particularly sensitive to changes in thermal and hydric environments because of their unshelled eggs and highly permeable skin. They breathe through their skin and any changes in moisture levels impact them severely, making them vulnerable to diseases.
Climate change is an overarching threat, as are the thousands of hydel dams coming up in the Western Ghats affecting rivers and streams, endangering the life-cycles of these magnificent creatures of the wild.
Vijay Bedi and his brother Ajay Bedi are award-winning wildlife filmmakers and photographers whose latest film is The Secret Life of Frogs
