Critically Endangered
Yellow-spotted bell frog
Litoria castanea
Yellow-spotted bell frog is a frog in the family Pelodryadidae (order Anura) — Litoria castanea, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
The yellow-spotted bell frog is distinguished by cream markings on its thighs. Its overall colour is pale green or golden brown and the dark to black spots are highlighted by the bronze patches. The yellow-spotted bell frog (Ranoidea castanea), also known as the yellow-spotted tree frog, New England swamp frog, or tablelands bell frog, is a frog in the family Pelodryadidae.
Range and habitat
The yellow-spotted bell frog is endemic to the New England Tablelands bioregion of south-eastern Australia. The species favours permanent water bodies and its natural habitats are temperate grassland, rivers, intermittent rivers, swamps, freshwater lakes, intermittent freshwater lakes, freshwater marshes, intermittent freshwater marshes, and ponds. It is a critically endangered species of frog that is endemic to south-eastern Australia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Calling males and egg sites define most frog field work. A species known from one ridge is as narrow as it sounds.
Eggs and damp skin make amphibians quick to vanish from a drained wetland or a forest stripped of litter.
In crisis
No recorded sighting had been made since 1980, and by 2004 the species was considered as possibly extinct. Even so, in late 2009 New South Wales Fisheries field scientist Luke Pearce located a surviving population of the frogs.
Chytrid fungus, collection, and wet-forest loss are the usual pressures on frogs with a high threat category.
Yellow-spotted bell frog is Critically 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 Yellow-spotted bell frog, Wikidata item Q301384. 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.
