20 species named by USU professor
Reptiles or amphibians. Either way, Joe Mendelson is happy.
Especially when he gets to name new species of them.
“It’s a thrill and an honor to name new species,” said Mendelson, assistant professor of biology at Utah State University.
“While I mostly work on frogs,” he said, “I have named two new species of snakes, one new lizard and two new salamanders.”
Last summer, Mendelson and colleagues from the United States and Mexico drove nearly 9,000 miles around Mexico conducting surveys of frogs in rain and cloud forests of southern Mexico.
This research was funded by National Geographic and was intended to check the current status of Mexican populations of frogs.
As for the results, Mendelson said he was disappointed.
“It was depressing to see how many populations have declined and how many species have clearly become extinct,” he said.
On this particular trip, however, they did find a new species of salamander and several rare frogs.
Over the years, he has found and named about 20 species of frogs from Latin America, plus a few snakes and lizards.
Mendelson conducts similar research with frogs in Guatemala.
“A primary aspect of these projects is to determine how many species exist in Mexico and Guatemala,” he said.
“It’s really fun naming new species, but in some cases, the new species I have found are already extinct,” Mendelson said.
He said people from the 1950s era are the last people to have seen some of the new species he finds and names today; they only exist today as a few representative specimens in natural history museums.
According to Mendelson, authority for him to name new species comes from the scientific community.
“I submit articles to appropriate scientific journals in my field,” he said, “and if they are accepted for publication, after a round of very critical reviews, then the name is official in the scientific literature.”
Mendelson researches frogs and snakes in Utah and Oregon, too.
At present, his lab at USU has specimens representing about eight new species of frogs, for which he will soon officially provide names.
Meanwhile, he said he gets the privilege of searching for new species, which requires lots of field work.
The official name of his field of study is “systematics,” in which he studies how many species of frogs and snakes there are in different parts of the world, leading to the end goal of discovering the number there are in the world.
Herpetology is the study of all amphibians, in addition to snakes, turtles, lizards and crocodiles.
However, he focuses mainly on snakes and frogs, because he’s had the most research experience with them.
In fact, Mendelson said his initial interest in herpetology developed years ago – when he was 5 years old.
He said his dad, who was in Vietnam at the time, sent him a stuffed cobra for a souvenir, which he still has sitting in his office at USU.
“Frogs help people and the ecosystem because they eat huge numbers of bugs,” he said.
“While we hear of countless people dying because of bugs,” Mendelson said, “I’ve never heard of a single frog killing anybody.”