Sri Lanka Painted Frog

Meet the Sri Lanka Painted Frog aka. Sri Lanka Bull Frog Kaloula taprobanica (Parker, 1934), an amphibian endemic to Sri Lanka and South India. This frog is peculiar in that during drier times, it leads a subterranean life—at times being found 10–12 feet under! It comes out during wet weather for breeding, and I found the above individual on my lawn on 14 July, 2010. This day turned out to be rainy towards the evening, resulted by a monsoonal high.

On 17 July, another rainy day, I found another Sri Lanka Painted Frog—this time, would you believe, inside my house! Compared to the previous one, it was less-colourful, fatter, and full of attitude; it was probably a female (based on at least two of those attributes).

The species name: taprobanica refers to taprobane—how Sri Lanka was known to Greeks and Romans since pre-Christian times. Taprobane had derived from the local name that was in use in the past: Thambapanni (aka. Thambrapanni), which means "copper-coloured palms". The legend has it that the palms of the hands of the ancient settlers, who arrived in Lanka from northern India in the 6th century B.C., became copper coloured when they sat on the shore following landfall. (No doubt their backsides too would have turned the same colour, but historians make no such referrence.) Thereon, the newfound land of those ancient settlers came to be known as Thambapanni. As mentioned above, it later became known as Taprobane for people in the West, who came here in search of gems, spices, and elephants—the latter were famously used for wars of Alexander the Great. (Onesicritus, a historical writer who accompanied the latter, claimed that elephants from Taprobane were larger and more pugnacious than those of India.)

Guiding some visitors from USA, I first visited the general area of the aforementioned legendary site of landfall in 2004. One such site: Kudremalai, situated bordering the Indian ocean inside the massive Wilpattu National Park, to my surprise, had rusty coloured soil all over, evidently following volcanic geological events in the past. Here's how the soil looked—with a Fan-throated Lizard Sitana ponticeriana as eye candy.