A UNO scientist best known for his research into fluttering fauna is now hopping through the rainforest -in name anyway. A newly discovered species of amphibian bears the moniker of none other than UNO’s own Philip J. DeVries, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. DeVries, an entomologist, is known for his comprehensive study of the biodiversity of butterflies of the rainforests. The frog, Chiasmocleis DeVriesi, was discovered in June 2004 in northeastern Peru by Chris Funk, a herpetologist and Assistant Professor of Biology at Colorado State University who had been influenced by DeVries early in his career. Funk was working with other biologists to better understand the processes of species division.

Funk was a prospective graduate student when he met DeVries at the University of Oregon in 1995 after DeVries distributed an email message in search of a field assistant for his butterfly study. “I flippantly volunteered and worked for a year in the Ecuadorian rainforest,” Funk recalls. “My experience changed my outlook on science and on life.” Funk went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Montana. Naming his discovery for his early research mentor is a “fitting tribute” to DeVries who “has made a lot of important contributions to understanding the patterns of species diversity. His longtime studies on butterflies opened the window into species diversity studies.”

Funk was a prospective graduate student when he met DeVries at the University of Oregon in 1995 after DeVries distributed an email message in search of a field assistant for his butterfly study. “I flippantly volunteered and worked for a year in the Ecuadorian rainforest,” Funk recalls. “My experience changed my outlook on science and on life.” Funk went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Montana. Naming his discovery for his early research mentor is a “fitting tribute” to DeVries who “has made a lot of important contributions to understanding the patterns of species diversity. His longtime studies on butterflies opened the window into species diversity studies.”

DeVries, recipient of both the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, uses “experimental and quantitative perspectives to explore general and specific questions to understand biological diversification and habitat conservation.” His decade-long study of tropical butterflies documented 145 species, the year-to-year variations of many of them, and the relative abundance of the species. Through documentations of single individuals over the 120 months he began to document how the butterflies move within their environment.

DeVries Costa Rican field guides (Princeton University Press) have become the standard reference works for Neotropical butterfly identification, life history and general natural history and are used as textbooks by students and researchers in ecology field courses throughout Central and South America. He has published numerous book chapters and scholarly articles, serves as a research associate for several natural history museums, as a journal reviewer for peer-review publications and a grant reviewer for several organizations, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, the Amazon Conservation Association and the National Geographic Society. DeVries research has been featured by national and international news media and was featured in the book, The Butterfly Hunter (2006) by Chris Ballard which was excerpted in Reader’s Digest in November 2006.

DeVries was headed in mid-March to attend the conference on Sustainable Conservation: Bridging the Gap between Disciplines in Trondheim, Norway, compliments of the Royal Society of London and Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. While there he planned to work with other researchers on his long-term tropical studies.

Funk and other researchers employ the principles of research and sampling techniques DeVries developed in his studies. “You inventory as much as you can while you’re there in the field,” Funk explained. During that to trip to Peru in 2004 “one species wasn’t in any of the literature.”

The genetic tissue of the mysterious frog was compared to that of other species to eventually verify that it is a newly discovered species. Chiasmocleis DeVriesi comes from a family of frogs commonly known as narrow-mouthed toads. The forest floor dwellers are often hidden among the leaf litter or soil and come up to travel to ponds in search of mates after it rains. Most species in the family are less than an inch long, while DeVries namesake is almost two inches.

Funk and co-author David C. Cannatella wrote in the article published in Zootaxa: “The specific name is… a patronym for Philip J. DeVries, one of the most influential researchers in tropical ecology and the person responsible for introducing [W. Chris Funk] to topical biology and the Amazon basin. Appropriately, DeVries’ long-term studies of Amazon butterfly diversity (e.g., DeVries et al. 1999, 2008, DeVries & Walla 2001) have highlighted the ubiquity and importance of rare species, such as Chiasmocleis DeVriesi, in lowland Amazonian rainforests.”

In addition to its large size, Chiasm ocleis DeVriesi is characterized by “a bright yellow iris, a grey dorsum with reddish blotches posterior and on limbs, and a creamy white venter with bold dark mottling with pale centers.”

Because there is so much diversity of species in the tropics, each species is fewer in number. For example, the Rockies are populated by just three species of trees while the Andes have 3,000 to 4,000 but fewer representatives of each species. This makes understanding the mysteries of the tropical environment more challenging because there are so many species yet to be discovered, DeVries said.

Thanks to his namesake, scientists are one species closer to understanding.

Story by Johanna Schindler