Scientists want your phone to track down Australia's hidden desert frogs

The Australian Museum wants ears across central Australia. Its free FrogID app is asking residents to record frog calls during FrogID Week, which runs until Sunday, and recent storms have opened a rare window: many desert frogs surface only after rain, when the conditions are right for breeding.

FrogID lead scientist Jodi Rowley says the central deserts rank among the toughest places in the country to study frogs. She notes that some of Australia's most poorly known frogs live there or in other remote corners of the country.

The headliners are the Tanami toadlet and the desert spadefoot. Both burrowers, they can vanish underground for months and possibly years, with some digging more than a metre down and sealing themselves in cocoons built from their own skin. Rowley says they have just two tasks when they finally emerge: eat as much as possible, and breed while water lasts.

The Tanami toadlet shows why the recordings matter. Scientists described the frog in 1981, but its call went unrecorded for 43 years — until March 2024, when more than 300 millimetres of rain hit the Australian Wildlife Conservancy's Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary in a single weekend. Wildlife ecologist Tim Henderson, who leads the sanctuary's science program, says his team walked to a flooded claypan where frogs were calling in abundance. They found Tanami toadlets and logged their calls with FrogID, handing researchers a new way to recognise the species. Henderson says simply being in the right place at the right time is what it takes, since the frogs emerge unpredictably.

The desert spadefoot, a spotted burrower, is next on the wish list, known for its repeated whooping call. Rowley calls it one of her favourites, and imitates it herself: something like whoop, whoop, whoop.

FrogID has logged roughly 1.5 million recordings since launching in 2017, helping map distributions and feeding into the scientific description of 13 new frog species. Remote Australia is still badly under-surveyed. One recording sent from a Northern Territory home turned up a frog more than 150 kilometres beyond its known range — proof, Rowley says, that in arid and remote areas a single submission can be a huge scientific discovery. Submissions work year-round, not just during FrogID Week, experts identify species from calls alone, and background noise is no obstacle. The best odds come after rain, often at night, though desert frogs will sometimes call in daylight.