Green or White's Treefrog / Litoria caerulea caresheet

[Herpvet]

Our third care and information sheet is for White's Treefrog, known to Australians as the Green Treefrog, Litoriea caerulea. It was written by our very own Kurt Kunze. It can be found here.

Please use this thread to discuss/debate/argue/change the care and information sheet.

Hi,

Thanks Kurt, very useful article.

Just a comment/ask for opinion - when researching a paper recently, I came to the conclusion that the preferred current name is Pelodryas caerulea. These names change so often nowadays it's difficult to be sure, and it appears to be one of those cases where not everyone agrees, but the consensus seemed to be for Pelodryas. Have I missed something more recent, or do you have any specific thoughts on that?

Best wishes,

Bruce.

[John]

I can't speak for Kurt but given the recent tendency of scientists to split first and ask questions later, I've become very sceptical of new taxonomy changes. The wise course seems to be to follow amphibiaweb.org's course, since many of the world's foremost herpetologists (real ones, scientists, not amateurs) are advisers on that site. Amphibiaweb still uses Litoria.

[Kurt]

You're welcome. I use Litoria for the same reason you use Pelodryas, it seems to be the general consensus. Personally, however, I rather use Pelodryas for caerulea as it seems to be built quite differently from other members of the genus Litoria, such as infrafrenata and chloris. Also there this whole subfamily name thing, Pelodryadinae. It seems weird to have a subfamily in where there are no frogs bearing the genus name Pelodryas.
So in conclussion, if it were up to me I would place caerulea and splendida back into the genus Pelodryas.