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Short Wave

These Scientists Are Using AI To Listen To Frogs

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.76K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you were a miner in California during the Gold Rush, you might have dined on a California red-legged frog. The largest native frog in the western United States, this Golden State denizen used to be found as far inland as the Sierra Nevada mountains and south, into Baja California. But today, they're listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Conservationists have worked to translocate new populations of the red-legged frog back to California in hopes that their numbers can be restored. But how do they monitor those populations' growth? Enter AI.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This message comes from Curiosity Weekly.

0:02.6

Science isn't just in the lab.

0:04.5

It's in the voices of people expanding what counts as science and opening up who

0:09.2

science is really for.

0:11.0

Listen to Curiosity Weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:15.5

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

0:20.7

Hey, Short Waver is Regina Barber here with just back from parental leave science

0:25.0

correspondent Nate Rot. Hey, Nate.

0:26.9

Hey, Regina. I am overjoyed to be back. But mostly, I am overjoyed to talk to you today

0:32.8

about frogs and more specifically an AI acoustic model to find them.

0:38.5

Okay, you definitely had me at frogs and you lost me just a little with AI acoustic model.

0:43.8

Yeah, that's fair. It's pretty technical speak. So let's start like this.

0:49.8

So what you're hearing right now, Regina, is a recording from a pond outside San Diego in Southern California. Wait, I think I heard a fair amount of frogs in that audio clip. Yeah, so unfortunately, in the words of Obi-1 Canobi, these are not the frogs you're looking for. I think that was like, these aren't the droids you're looking for, but I appreciate the effort. Yeah, you know, any Star Wars reference I can squeeze in is great.

1:12.0

So what you're hearing there are tree frogs, they're chorus frogs.

1:15.5

Your classic, you know, rib it, ribbit, ribbit ones.

1:18.3

Okay.

1:18.7

But what scientists are trying to hear in these thousands of hours of recordings they've

1:22.8

collected is the California red-legged frog, a federally threatened species.

1:28.5

Here's Susan North, the director of stewardship for the Nature Conservancy in California.

1:32.5

The California red-legged frog is the largest native frog in the western United States,

1:37.3

meaning it can grow up to a whopping five inches in size.

1:41.2

Five inches?

...

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