A Tiny Frog Biologist
Albertina Lima and her daughter Jaci in Santarém in 1979.
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The Fish and the Frogs
I transferred from the Fisheries Department to the Ecology Department in
1980. This brought much more research freedom, but also much less logistical
support. The Fisheries Department had many trucks and a fleet of boats.
Ecology had one beaten-up Kombi van that I could use, but only on weekends
or at night when there were no demands on it for work around the city. I had
been renting a house in a suburb not far from INPA that was near the edge of
the city. However, a house came up for sale and I used my meager savings to
buy it. The sale price was very low, about US$7000 on today’s value, because
the house faced a reserve with a small stream and the woman who owned the
house could not stand the sound of the frogs.
I looked for study sites in Manaus and on the periphery of the city, but they
were all changing quickly because of the influx of new residents. The stream in
front of my house is now polluted and supports few frogs, and the places I went
to on the edge of Manaus in 1979 are now in the middle of the city, so it is
fortunate that I did not invest much time there. A researcher said that there was
a reserve about 25 km from the center of the city that was owned by INPA. It
was originally intended as a forestry reserve, but plantation forestry is expensive
and unproductive in the Amazon and the reserve, named after the famous
botanist Adolpho Ducke, was designated as an ecological reserve in 1972.
The experience at Alter do Chão had piqued my interest in foraging ecology
and I even included exercises with frogs in my Animal Ecology classes. After
explaining the theory, I told the students to compare long-legged sit-and-wait
predators, which were usually tree frogs or large ground frogs, with
short-legged wide foragers, such as toads and burrowing frogs. The students
enjoyed clearing the furniture out of the room and prodding a long-legged frog
to jump until it was exhausted. The first jump covered several meters, but it
usually only took three or four hops for the frog to run out of steam and fall
belly up, unable to move for another five to ten minutes. It had used anaerobic
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respiration to fuel the mighty leaps and had to clear the accumulated lactic acid
from its muscles before it could continue.
Photo 12.1 Treefrogs, such as this Hypsiboas geographicus, can leap large distances in
a single bound, but tire quickly. Photo by Bill Magnusson.
It was a different story with the toads and burrowing frogs. Their short hops
took them around the room at a steady pace and their aerobic respiration kept
their muscles working for long periods. Very often, the experiment stopped with
the student belly up and exhausted before the frog gave up! Although the
experimental demonstration of the limits to physiology was interesting, I
wanted to see if this translated into differences in behavior in the wild.
Therefore, we built a camp beside a small stream, IgarapéAcará, about 4 km
from the edge of the reserve and started watching animals behaving naturally in
the forest.
Albertina had come to Manaus and was working as my assistant. She fell in
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love with the frogs and was far better than I or any of my students at finding and
following them, but her schooling had not prepared her for reading scientific
papers in English. One of my students, who is now a professor at the Federal
University of Amazonas, was studying foraging and we were sitting in the camp
on IgarapéAcarádiscussing the structure of the paper he would write based on
the data that he, I and Albertina had collected. Albertina said nothing in front of
the student, but afterwards came to me and said in Portuguese “Why can’t I
write the papers? I know far more about the animals than he does.”
I replied that writing papers was difficult, involved reading a lot of literature,
including papers written in languages other than Portuguese, and that she did
not have the educational background for the task. She said “I will write papers
about the animals we are studying” and stalked off.
About three weeks later, she said dejectedly “You were right. I tried to write
a paper and couldn’t do it. I’ll have to go to university.” She had sat the
entrance exam for the university when she first arrived in Manaus, but had
failed miserably. Her education at the tiny government school in Santarém had
not prepared her to compete with students from rich families, most of which had
gone to expensive private schools.
Albertina went to a preparatory course for the entrance exam and a year later
sat the exam again. Her grades on most of the subjects were sufficient to get her
into the Faculty of Medicine, but she received a score of zero in Portuguese
writing, and was eliminated. Her Portuguese teacher could not believe that she
had not passed and went to the university to see her exam paper. The subject of
the essay had been Hope for Brazil, and that was the first year of free elections
after the military government. Albertina wrote that democracy was the hope for
Brazil. The examiner, who must have been a military sympathizer, had not even
judged the Portuguese construction. They just wrote in Portuguese “Strayed off
the topic”.
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Photo 12.2 Albertina sitting in a fungus, Lago Calado, in the early 1980s.
Photo by Bill Magnusson.
A year later, Albertina sat the entrance exam again, passed, and entered the
Biology Faculty. By that time, she had developed a deep interest in all of
biology and completed the course in three years, a year less than most students.
She then sat the entrance exam and started a Master of Science in Ecology at the
National Institute for Amazonian Research.
While she had been completing her undergraduate course, we continued
studying the frogs of Reserva Ducke. Albertina’s sharp eyes located many tiny
frogs on the leaf litter during the day. Most were only about the size of my
fingernail, and were generally the color of fallen leaves. At a distance, they
were hard to distinguish from the many crickets and spiders that jumped away
from our feet, but up close they showed a surprising variety. There were five to
seven species in most places, not counting the burrowing species that almost
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never appeared on the surface, and they belonged to three different families.
At first I thought that they must be juveniles, but when we caught and
identified them we found that most of the species had maximum lengths around
two centimeters. Albertina sat watching them for hours, recording how often
they jumped and how far they moved. Each species had a unique style of
foraging, or lived in a particular part of the forest, such as around streams, or
high on the hills. As there were many papers coming out on the relationship
between foraging mode and diet at the time, Albertina decided to use the data
she had collected for her Master’s thesis.
Following the frogs required good natural-history skills, but examining the
diet was even harder. The tiny frogs ate microscopic prey, and the juveniles
were tiny. I could have fit 20 on a thumbnail. Albertina had to identify the
miniscule mites and springtails the juveniles ate, and even the ants and
grasshoppers that the adults fed on were hard to see with the naked eye. She
developed equations to estimate the weight of individual prey items by sorting
them into large enough piles for the precision balance to be able to weigh them.
The frogs’ diets were related to the way they foraged, and Albertina
published several papers on the subject42. However, one of the most important
revelations for me was that the juveniles ate different things from the adults.
Most of the ecological literature discussed differences between species as
though they were fixed, and this is basically true for birds and mammals. Babies
of these groups are dependent on adults for food and grow very quickly to adult
size, so that one measure can describe the size of most of the individuals
foraging for food. In contrast, the young of most other types of animal are not
fed by their parents, and they forage independently. Therefore, while it makes
sense to give the average size of a species of mammal or bird, the mean size of a
species of frog, fish or lizard will not be a good description of any particular
individual; most will be very much larger or smaller.
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Photo 12.3 Most diurnal ground frogs, such as this Adenomera species, do not grow
much larger than a human toe nail. Photo by Bill Magnusson.
Albertina’s work showed that juvenile frogs were essentially different
ecological species from the adults of the same taxonomic species. In general,
the leaf-litter frogs ate mites and springtails when small, and ants or other
insects as adults. This meant that there was no typical diet for the species.
Juveniles of different species were more similar to each other in diet than they
were to adults of their own species. Whereas researchers had used species as
points on their graphs relating behavior to diet, this did not make sense for the
leaf-litter frogs, and Albertina had to construct complex graphs to show the
relationships between foraging mode, diet and size43.
By this time, Albertina had published a number of papers and attended
international conferences, and her work was known to several famous ecologists.
The course regulations permitted a Master’s student to change to a Ph.D. degree
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if they could show that their work was advanced and they had recommendation
letters from established researchers. Albertina requested an upgrade to a Ph.D.
degree and provided letters of support from famous ecologists, such as Eric
Pianka. The course council did not approve her request. One of the councilors
purportedly asked in Portuguese “Who are these people? I have never heard of
them!” I don’t know all the reasons for the decision, but I am fairly sure that the
request would have been granted if Albertina had been a rich male student from
a southern university rather a poor female student from the Amazon.
Albertina therefore completed her Master’s degree, which she did in record
time. The remainder of the data was sufficient for her Ph.D. thesis, which she
also completed in record time. Some of the World’s most famous ecologists
were on her examining committee, but approval was almost guaranteed because
she had already published the results in prestigious journals.
Albertina taught me a lot about frogs, but she also taught me about the value
of persistence and courage. Whenever one of my rich students from a top
university is complaining about how difficult it is to publish, I think of
Albertina. She had everything against her and still managed to be a top scientist.
She is now a level 1A researcher of the Brazilian National Research Council
and is in her second term as the Coordinator of the Post-Graduate Course in
Ecology. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but it would be fair to
say that, as soon as I was old enough, my mother had a metal spoon to feed me.
Albertina probably had a spoon fashioned from a palm frond! When I think of
what she has achieved, I am humbled.
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Photo 12.4 Albertina Lima with Eric Pianka and Justin Condon at the World Congress
of Herpetology, Canterbury, in 1989. Photo by Bill Magnusson.