Happy Birthday Murray!

Since its inception, Frogs Victoria’s proudest talking point is that the most esteemed of amphibian biologists, Professor Murray Littlejohn, is our organisation’s patron. This honour immediately provided gravitas to a fledgling group whose existence is in no small part based on the remarkable and ongoing legacy of your career.

Murray, the aims and core values of Frogs Victoria are in near-perfect alignment with your most distinguished career. We too seek knowledge, understanding, collaboration, connection, and conservation. Our ability to achieve in these spheres has at its foundation the enormous body of knowledge built by you, and those you nurtured to great achievements with you and because of you.

Frogs Victoria thanks you for your patronage, wishes you the happiest of birthdays for your 90th and looks forward to a continuing connection with you.

Dr Renee Catullo, "How many species of toadlets (Uperoleia)?" November 2021

Dr Renee Catullo is a Lecturer at University of Western Australia, with over 10 years' experience working on northern Australian frogs. She did her PhD trying to understand the systematics of Uperoleia frogs, and that still forms part of her research to this day. More recently, her work as focused more broadly on the landscape genetics of threatened vertebrate species. Renee presents:

"How many species of toadlets (Uperoleia)?"

The little brown toadlets in the genus Uperoleia have long been a conundrum. How many species are there? How do you tell them apart? Can they tell each other apart? Renee will talk about more than a decade of work on Uperoleia, which have turned out to be even more complicated (and interesting) than expected. She will also talk about some of the interesting times doing frog fieldwork in the monsoon tropics – both chasing and running from cyclones.

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Professor Michael Mahony​, "Fire, flood and pestilence, but not a plague of frogs" October 2021

Michael is an Honorary Professor in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle. He is a conservation biologist and his working life has mostly been spent at the University, having studied frogs professionally for over 30 years. Michael spent over a decade on the technical and scientific advisory committee for the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area and the rainforest fauna is one of main interests, although his first work was on desert frogs. Michael is presenting:

"Fire, flood and pestilence, but not a plague of frogs"

Understanding and mitigating the impact of intense and widespread wildfires on frogs is a challenging task. Michael will cover some of the efforts and strategies that his research group has taken since the Black Summer fires of 2019-20. He will place this work in the context of thirty years struggling to deal with an invasive pathogen and the gradual progression of climate warming and drought.