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Digital Froglogger - A new approach to automated animal calls recording

New info for 2008: I'll no longer accept new orders. Other commitments make it impossible for me to continue development of these systems. Collaborations are always welcomed. The info in this site will stay online as a reference.  New:   -Wiki   -How-to tutorials   -New ultra small Frogloggers

I wanted to use a Froglogger to determine the highest periods of activity during the night for Eleutherodactylus frogs in Puerto Rico. However, I wanted to replace the tape recorder with a digital recorder to transfer easily the recordings to a computer for analysis and filtering. This was necessary because the most common frog in the island, E. coqui, occurs at high densities and its call is very loud, possibly masking other species calls. Since most of the rest species of Eleutherodactylus in the island are endangered, it is imperative to find new populations to study and protect. Using software it is very easy to filter out E. coqui and listen for other species. A similar approach can be used in many areas around the world and in many situations.

Wildlife Acoustics have an automated recorder, the Song Meter.

The Bioacoustics Research Program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have Autonomous Recording Units, which seem to be based on an embedded computer. They have not released the details of their system but recently started leasing them.

The original Froglogger

The system described by Peterson & Dorcas (1994), and now commonly known as a Froglogger, enables the researcher to records audio without supervision for later analysis. This enables the monitoring of animal calls during intervals and long periods of time that would be impossible for a person or too expensive. For example, you can record a few minutes every hour during several days or weeks.

As an example of the important and valuable information that can be obtained only by using a Froglogger is the paper by Bridges and Dorcas (2000). They found that Rana sphenocephala, which was described previously as calling during early spring and early fall, was also very active calling during the summer, but between 2:00 and 5:00.

The name can be misleading, the Froglogger has many applications not only for frogs and toads, but also for many other animals that call, like insects, birds and mammals (including marine mammals using a hydrophone).

Acknowledgments - I want to thank the NSF-EPSCoR Graduate Fellowship for their support during initial development. Also S. Brandes who pointed me the recording capabilities of the Nomad 3 MP3 player. P. Bright wrote the first version of the program and built the prototype controller. My graduate advisor, John Thomlinson for his enthusiasm for these systems and Mitch Aide for his constant input of ideas and "challenges" to improve the systems.

Literature cited:

Bridges, A. S. and M. E. Dorcas. 2000. Temporal variation in anuran calling behavior: implications for surveys and monitoring programs. Copeia 2000: 587-592.

Peterson, C. R., and M. E. Dorcas. 1994. Automated data acquisition. Pp. 47-57. In: Heyer, W. R., M. A. Donnelly, R. W. McDiarmid, L. C. Hayek, and M. S. Foster (eds.). Measuring and monitoring biological diversity: Standard methods for amphibians. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.