Anyone who spends time near a swamp can easily hear that frogs use their voices to chitchat, however it wasn’t until about 20 years ago that researchers announced that these animals also talk to water-transported protein pheromones.
Now a new study shows frogs banter with airborne chemicals too.
“It’s the initial proof that frogs use volatile pheromones” to communicate, says Schultz, a chemical ecologist on the Technical University of Braunschweig, in Germany. In reality, it’s the initial proof that any amphibians communicate using chemicals in the air, he adds (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI)

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“So few pheromones are already chemically identified in vertebrates, so this is really exciting news,” an amphibian biologist at Duquesne University. She indicates that biologists had done behavioral studies suggesting frogs used airborne pheromones, but none had been identified so far.

Inside the new study, Schulz collaborated with TU Braunschweig zoologist Miguel Vences and Harvard University’s Katharina Wollenberg, who went to Madagascar to study a local group of frogs called Mantellidae.

Male Mantellidae frogs have bulbous organs on the inner thighs called femoral glands, and it’s readily available sacs that the team isolated two molecules that waft with the air as pheromones, namely 8-methyl-2-nonanol plus a macrolide called phoracantholide J.

The team learned that Mantellidae frogs will hop toward a combination of both of these molecules and that different species have different ratios of which inside their femoral glands. What specifically these frogs are saying with all the molecules comes to an end in the air, but Schulz has some speculations.

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“Frogs occur in high species diversity over these swampy areas-there are about 100 species,” Schulz says. Even though the different species croak uniquely, the frog density is so high that “it can often be difficult to discover a mate with the correct species.” Perhaps the odors assistance with species recognition, he suggests.
The brand new research also confirms the outcomes of frog genome sequencing, Woodley says. Frog DNA has all sorts of genes for volatile chemical receptors, but nobody knew if they were functional genes or just an artifact of evolution. “It turns out they could be functional,” she adds.

Schulz’s team isolated a handful of other alcohols and macrolides in the frogs’ femoral glands, including a new natural product called gephyromantolide A. The team also devised a fresh synthetic route for building the ringed molecules which uses a reaction called Corey-Nicolaou macrolactonization. The route, the shortest such path ever reported, provided enough sample to check which with the additional molecules are pheromones.