Froggy the Hitchhiker

This little guy decided to ride out Tropical Storm Fay inside with my plants. If you look carefully at the first picture you can see another set of little eyes from inside the roots. It's called a Greenhouse frog Eleutherodactylus planirostris (Cope 1862)
Thanks to Mr & Mrs Apteryx australis @ www.flickr.com/people/dakluza/ for a speedy proper Id. I confirmed that here nis.gsmfc.org/nis_factsheet.php?toc_id=205






Description:
Greenhouse frogs are brown with distinct reddish tones. The tip of the snout is red and there is usually a black interorbital blotch (Dundee and Rossman, 1989). The legs are banded with brown. The eyes are reddish and the belly is white. The vomerine teeth are in transverse series behind the internal nares. The toepads are truncated. The toes are long and slender with strongly developed tubercules at the joints and terminal disks. The toes lack webbing (Wright and Wright, 1949; Behler, 1979; Dundee and Rossman, 1989; Conant and Collins, 1991). They have somewhat of a pointed nose (Carmichael and Williams, 1991). There are two morphs, a striped morph with longitudinal light stripes, and a mottled morph with irregular dark and light markings (Behler, 1979; Ashton and Ashton, 1988; Dundee and Rossman, 1989; Conant and Collins, 1991). From a total of 211 specimens collected in Miami, and the upper and lower Keys, Duellman and Schwartz (1958) found the mottled morph to be consistently more common (ranging from 55.9 to 71.6% of the specimens) than the striped morph (ranging from 28.4 to 44.1% of the specimens) in each area.

Biology:
Greenhouse frogs are mostly terrestrial and nocturnal, seeking shelter by day beneath boards, leaves, trash, or other debris where there is moisture. Their call is a faint cheep repeated one to four times. Their voice resembles that of an insect. They call at night or during rains usually from April to September in Florida (Ashton and Ashton, 1988). They thrive in altered areas and are commonly found in greenhouses, gardens, junk yards, and also occur in moist wooded areas and gopher tortoise burrows (Carmichael and Williams; Conant and Collins, 1991).

excerpt from http://nis.gsmfc.org/nis_factsheet.php?toc_id=205


Froggy the Hitchhiker by Eric Bronson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.flickr.com