Linocut prints by Ukrainian folk painter Oleksandr Ivakhnenko from a book featuring the poem: “A Cherry Orchard by the House” written by famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko
Approximately how many frogs are there on Earth? A few years ago my friends and I were trying to figure out the answer for fun but we couldn't find even a high-margin-of-error estimate anywhere.
If this pattern holds in the case in the rest of the hyper-diverse areas of the world, but not the temperate regions (an assumption with good empirical foundation, based on combined low diversity and low species description rate), I would conservatively estimate that the total number of frog species on earth is somewhere around 14,000—not quite double the current tally. So there remains a lot of taxonomic and exploratory work to do!
But if your question refers to the total number of individuals, that number is impossible to quantify, or even really estimate, because there are too many variables. Do you count tadpoles? What about eggs? For some species, there are millions of adults, and in some parts of the year probably billions of tadpoles, because each female can lay multiple clutches of thousands (>20,000 in some toads) of eggs in a single season. For other species, there are tiny populations, and clutches are small; even as low as two or three froglets (most of these are direct developers). Averaged out, I think you might still come to tens of billions of frogs alive on Earth at any one time… and most of those would be toads, because bufonids pretty much always have the largest clutches. Most will not make it through metamorphosis, and only a tiny fraction make it to adulthood. But there are a lot—and I mean a lot—of frogs in the world. And if that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.
Gift of R. Thornton Wilson, in memory of Florence Ellsworth Wilson, 1954
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Hard-paste porcelain (Jingdezhen ware)
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