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While you are sitting at your desk sipping your coffee, there is a biologist somewhere in a remote jungle in Cuba worming his way through damp leaf litter, trying to ignore the swarms of mosquitoes sipping his blood. He pauses, motionless, concentrating, trying to not become distracted by the joyful dawn chorus of thousands of birds, trying not to hear the persistent whine of hungry mosquitoes. The biologist wonders, not for the first time, if the source of the sound that he is seeking was the result of his runaway imagination. Maybe he shouldn’t have had that third cup of coffee before setting out this morning?

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A single adult collected in 1955 was the last confirmed sighting of this species. The Hula painted frog was recorded in only two localities on the eastern shore of Israel’s Lake Huleh. It may also have been found in adjacent parts of Syria.

In the 1950s, the Huleh marshes were drained in an attempt to both eradicate malaria and to make the land suitable for agricultural use. Of the original 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres) of marshland, only 300 hectares (740 acres) remained after drainage. While this remaining wetland (considerably far from the recorded range of the frog) was set aside as a nature reserve in 1964, this action may have been too late to save the species.

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