This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Koki frogs. They're named for the sound they make.

And though just an inch long a coqui can produce a 90 decibel

call about the volume of a motorcycle 25 feet away. The animals and their nocturnal chirps are beloved in their native Puerto Rico, but not in Hawaii where they became invasive in the late 1980s.

The frogs have become a nuisance in part because they cause people to lose sleep, which is actually driven down property values.

But some of Hawaii's endangered insect species could face extinction due to the hungry invaders.

Biologists also fear that the frogs could impact Hawaii's insect population to such an extent that native birds that also eat insects could go hungry.

A group of researchers has now put that concern to the test by looking at 30 sites on the Big Island, half that were infested with coquies, and half that were still coquie-free.

And we didn't see any response in the native birds.

They seemed to be going fine with the coquies.

At least their abundances were similar in the places where they were coquees and not coquees.

University of Utah Ecologist Karen Beard.

But it was a non-native birds where we really saw the response.

And we didn't see it in a negative way.

Three types of non-native birds were actually more abundant in areas with more frogs.

And we were like, huh, you know, that's kind of interesting.

The researchers think they can explain this in two parts.

Cochees forage and leaf litter, while Hawaii's native insect-eating birds forage in the canopy and understory, so they may be going after different types of prey.

Meanwhile, the non-native birds may be getting a boost by eating the frogs themselves. After all, a fingernail-sized baby

cookie frog is about the same size as a typical rainforest insect. The study is in the journal The Condor. the

the study is in the journal The Condor. Despite these findings,

cookie frogs could still harm Hawaii's native birds,

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