Giant burrowing frog

Appearance

It is normally grey, dark brown or black on the back. There are yellow spots on the side and a yellow stripe on the upper lip, from the back of the eye to the back of the tympanum. In metamorph frogs, this stripe is pink-orange in colour.

This is a large species of frog, up to 10 centimetres (3.9 in) in length.

Range and habitat

The giant burrowing frog or eastern owl frog is a large frog species that occurs in coastal south-east New South Wales and Victoria in Australia.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Breeding

The first captive breeding program for the giant burrowing frog is under way as of 2021, managed by Melbourne Zoo and the Arthur Rylah Institute.

In crisis

First assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as a vulnerable species in 2002, its status has since been changed to endangered as of 2023. As of 2021 it is listed as vulnerable in New South Wales under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 (NSW) and threatened under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 (Vic). It is also Listed as Critically Endangered on the Advisory List of Threatened Vertebrate Fauna in Victoria (2013 list).

Chytrid fungus, collection, and wet-forest loss are the usual pressures on frogs with a high threat category.

Giant burrowing frog is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Giant burrowing frog, Wikidata item Q2275505. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.