Went for a night walk and found an endangered Frog

Today I was walking around 7pm to get some fresh air after sitting in front of my computer the whole day. I was hoping moonlight would show me the path but the sky was full of clouds and it was pitch black.

So I had to to use my phone's flashlight instead! And while walking I almost stepped on this little buddy who was preparing for his dinner (I guess). So I captured few shots from my mobile phone camera and came back home and did some digging to find the species to which it belongs.

Frogs belong to the class of Amphibians and I found out Sri Lanka has 116 species of Amphibians and 90% of them are endemic

I compared the one I found to images found on iNaturalist and based on the images and location, concluded it belongs to the species Pseudophilautus fulvus also known as Knuckles Shrub Frog (please correct me if I'm wrong here) which is endemic to Sri Lanka and considered to be Endangered according to IUCN ( International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources)

I stayed with the Frog for more than an hour to see him catching the prey and finally captured it on Video. I have posted the video as a GIF below for you to see.

As frogs don't have teeth, they use their tongue to catch the prey. As you can see in the video (GIF), the frog first jumps forward before sticking it's tongue out.

This particular species of Frog (Knuckles Shrub Frog) has been endangered mainly due to human activities leading it to the loss of its habitats. There has been only 6 recorded observations for this species and the last observation back in December 2019. I'll be adding this observation to iNaturalist so I can know the species surely and they can update their observation record.

Here 's the complete taxonomy of the Frog I found;

Thank you so much for reading this post!!!

All Images were captured with my smartphone camera.