Do you know about the ‘Frogman of India,’ who is one of the few living scientists in the world who have described more than a hundred amphibians? Yes, we are talking about Sathyabhama Das Biju, who is a Senior Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at University of Delhi and an associate of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University under whose guidance Indian herpetology underwent a sea change.
He was born in the village of Kadakkal in Kerala, India, grew up in a family of farmers. Originally a junior scientist researching plants, he found the work uninspiring.
With his meager salary, he bought a camera and a motorcycle and began exploring the forests of southern India. It was during these adventures that he developed a passion for frogs.
After completing his Master’s in Botany from Kerala University in 1987 and earning a PhD in Plant Systematics from Calicut University in 1999, Sathyabhama Das Biju worked as a scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute in Kerala. However, he eventually grew tired of working with plants.
Sathyabhama Das Biju became really interested in frogs during his field trips in the Western Ghats while searching for plants. To dive deeper into the world of amphibians, he decided to stop studying plants in 2000 and joined Franky Bossuyt at the Amphibian Evolution Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. There, he earned another PhD, this time in Amphibian Systematics.
In less than ten years focusing on amphibians, Sathyabhama Das Biju has discovered over 100 new species, describing 96 of them formally. One of his significant finds is the purple frog family Nasikabatrachus in the Western Ghats, which was considered a once-in-a-century discovery.
Sathyabhama Das Biju was worried about amphibians disappearing rapidly (they’re the most endangered group of vertebrates globally), so he took action. He created two important projects in India to help save them. One is the Western Ghats Network of Protected Areas of Threatened Amphibians (WNPATA), which brings together people and groups working on amphibians in the Western Ghats.
The second initiative is a big campaign called the Lost Amphibians of India (LAI). Its goal is to find ‘lost’ species that haven’t been seen alive for up to 200 years. More than 600 people are part of LAI, and they’ve done about 42 trips to search for these lost amphibians.
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