> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# A glass frog with an Olympic name
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/glassfrog/
- Published: 2026-08-29T06:04:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T04:43:23.000Z
- Description: In a cloud forest reserve in Ecuador, a young biologist has found a frog new to science, green as a leaf above and see through below, and named her for the first Ecuadorian woman ever to win Olympic gold.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

High in the Cordillera del Condor, inside Ecuador's El Quimi Biological Reserve, lives a frog that no book contained until this April. She is small enough to sit on a thumbnail, pebbly pea green above with eyes ringed in silver and gold, and her underside is glass: look from below and you can see her organs at work, with a fine white veil drawn over her heart. Mylena Masache, a biology student at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador, described the new species with her colleagues in the journal PLOS One, from specimens found on museum expeditions into the reserve. They named her Nymphargus dajomesae, for Neisi Dajomes, the weightlifter who in Tokyo became the first Ecuadorian woman to win an Olympic gold medal. A frog of quiet strength, named for a woman of the loud kind.

The lovelier news is where she lives. On the expeditions that found her, more than eight and a half of every ten amphibian species the team observed were previously unknown to science, which is why the researchers call El Quimi a lost world of amphibian diversity. Whole choruses are singing up there that no scientist has yet written down. Glass frogs spend their lives in trees along mountain streams, the males guarding clutches of eggs on the undersides of leaves until the tadpoles drop into the water below, and every new species named is a thread tying that hidden world to ours. Somewhere in the cloud forest tonight, the Dajomes glassfrog is sitting on a wet leaf above a stream, heart beating behind its white veil, entirely unaware of the gold medal in her name.

### Questions you might have

**Why are glass frogs see through?**

The going theory is camouflage of a clever kind. Seen from below against the light, a see through body casts almost no outline, and the frog softens into the leaf she sits on. It works so well that some glass frogs even tuck most of their red blood cells into their liver while they sleep, becoming clearer still.

**Did the Olympic champion know?**

The name honours Neisi Dajomes, who won gold in Tokyo in weightlifting and made history for Ecuadorian women. Scientific names are a science tradition of tribute: the describers chose a woman whose strength and firsts match a frog found where almost nothing has a name yet.

**Could there really be more unknown frogs up there?**

Almost certainly. When more than eight in ten amphibians seen on an expedition are new to science, a reserve is less a catalogue and more an unopened library. That is exactly why places like El Quimi are protected before every species in them is known.

*Our short take: the species was described by Mylena Masache and colleagues of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador in PLOS One, 8 April 2026, reported by NPR, 14 April 2026\. Photograph: the Dajomes glassfrog, Nymphargus dajomesae, from the species description by Masache and colleagues, PLOS One, under CC BY 4.0.*