Richard Lehtinen

Poster presented at OHPARC meeting I presented a poster on long-term changes in salamander body size at the annual Ohio Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation […]

Since 2005, I have been formally cataloguing the amphibians and reptiles of Wooster Memorial Park (Wayne Co., Ohio). As of the spring of 2022, I was aware of seven species of salamanders, five species of frogs, […]

David Raines (’15) and I co-authored a poster entitled “Does past reproductive success influence subsequent reproductive performance?” at the recent Evolution conference in Cleveland, Ohio. This poster […]

Congrats to Alexa Rojas (’18), Haley Hartman (’18) and Blake Marlowe (’17) on the recent publication of their (combined) undergraduate thesis research in the Journal of Herpetology!

This morning a new strawberry poison dart frog metamorph made its first appearance. Brightened what had been a bit of a gloomy day. Welcome to this thing called life, little one.

Back in June, Dr. Katherine Krynak (Ohio Northern University), John McCall (Michigan Tech. University) and I completed our fifth year of field surveys for Blanchard’s cricket frog, with the help of three awesome […]

The online early version of our new paper on glass frog communities in old-growth and second-growth rain forests is now available. This paper is the result of seven expeditions over five years to Costa Rica and […]

2020 has been a long year for everyone and it was a challenging to finish my salamander fieldwork for this year. I have several large, ongoing projects with local salamanders but under normal circumstances, I […]

Since 2011, I have been the director of the Fern Valley Field Station, the College of Wooster’s outdoor learning laboratory. This 56-acre property was generously donated to the College by David and Betty Wilkin. M […]

After over two years of research and compiling information, I am happy to say that my new website “Phytotelm Breeding Frogs of the World” has launched! Phytotelm breeding frogs are those that reproduce in pla […]

Just a few days ago, our first paper on melanistic gray squirrels appeared in the journal Ecology and Evolution. This paper was ten years in the making, as the first squirrel surveys in this effort were conducted […]

I sit here in mid-December with the thermometer holding steady at 19 degrees F (-7 degrees C) and all the frogs, snakes, salamanders and lizards in Ohio are down for a long winter’s nap. Only a few weeks ago, h […]

Thanks to Dr. Cori Richards-Zawacki at the University of Pittsburgh and the hard work of Mackenzie Goltz (’20), we now have a dart frog colony at the College of Wooster! These little beauties are originally from P […]

I’ve done a variety of things in my life for a job. Fast food employee, warehouse worker, grocery store shelf-stocker, golf caddy, corn detasseler. And, this past week, I pursued gainful employment as a snake c […]

A beautiful spring day this morning and instead of staring at a mountain of email in my office, I went out to Wooster Memorial Park. The fresh air and sunshine did me good. Trees are leafing out, migratory […]

On March 20th, the Ohio Chapter of Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conversation (PARC) held its 2nd annual meeting. My student Jesse Garrett-Larsen (’19) and I attended and presented this poster on our work on  […]

Recently, two colleagues and I described two more new species in the frog genus Guibemantis. This brings the total number of species in the genus to thirteen, more than doubling the known diversity in this group […]

Body coloration is important to organisms for a wide range of reasons including mate attraction, camouflage and thermoregulation. Short term changes in body coloration in frogs have been reported for a number of […]

My colleagues and I have just published a paper describing a new rain forest frog in the genus Guibemantis from northern Madagascar.

We named it Guibemantis milingilingy, the latter part of which means “in […]