OMG OMG OMG Grey Treefrogs Hyla versicolor

[Kurt]

heres an idea

What's the idea?

[tattooed81]

notice the yellow copes don`t have that do they anyway Denny down at Off The Ark exotic pet store is a herpetologist and he says it is defiantly Hyla versicolor

[Kurt]

I don't think the yellow flash colour is versicolor specific. John, care to weigh in on this?

[tattooed81]

here another. And I trust Denny he is an expert. I wish i had went to college to be a herpetologist he also said that cope`s can not be found in Richmond

[Kurt]

I cannot confirm, nor deny that versicolor is the only gray treefrog that can be found in the Richmond area. However I am more comfortable with the assumtion that it is the only gray species there.
Yellow on the thighs is not versicolor specific and some specimens actually have orange rather than yellow.

[John]

Yellow on the thighs is not versicolor specific and some specimens actually have orange rather than yellow.

My breeding male has yellow, my breeding female (from the same place) has almost no marking there, and my second male, also from a versicolor only area, is bright orange in that place.

[Kurt]

My breeding male has yellow, my breeding female (from the same place) has almost no marking there, and my second male, also from a versicolor only area, is bright orange in that place.

So there you go. "Hyla versicolor is a tetraploid species, which means that it has two pairs of each set of chromosomes in each of it's cells. Cope's gray treefrog, H. chrysoscelis is a diploid species meaning it has normal chromosome pairs." - Me, upcoming gray treefrog article. That's true difference between the two species.

[John]

here another. And I trust Denny he is an expert. I wish i had went to college to be a herpetologist he also said that cope`s can not be found in Richmond

No offense to Denny but if he is using just visual criteria then he doesn't know much about Gray Treefrogs.

[tattooed81]

OK everyone that viewed this thread. I need to admit something. I wild caught these Grey tree frogs my self last night. I was afraid if I say "hey look what I caught" that I would have had my account deleted so I lied about where I got them. I do have a friend at the spca thats where I got my side neck turtle. But I went frog hunting last night and caught these hyla versicolor in a area that is void of the cope`s grey treefrog thats how I know that this is a hyla versicolor I`m sorry for the diseption and it won`t happen agin. On a good note I have been hunting for these frogs for 2 years and I finally found them

[John]

No big deal. It's not like you were harvesting them for a wholesaler or something.

[John]

You cannot visually tell these species apart from each other. Anyone who tells you that you can is frankly talking out of their *** - it's a myth. In fact, there are papers published on trying to discern these two species using physical characteristics and the only one that found anything discernible was one that measured body proportions (like length of one bone in proportion to another, etc, within each frog species) and they found that they could tell the frog species apart correctly a little more than half the time.

I've seen other people say one species it not as bumpy as the other, or one is greener than the other, etc - it's all bogus. I am lucky in that I collected my frogs personally from an area where I found Hyla chrysoscelis absent. Kurt is in a similar situation - only H. versicolor is present.

For what it's worth, if your frogs sound _exactly_ like the call you posted a link to here then it is probably Hyla versicolor and not Hyla chrysoscelis. The problem is that H. chrysoscelis' call is just a faster and higher pitched version of H. versicolor's, and temperature slows down and lowers the pitch of both calls.