Male chameleons change their coloring to help them blend in to their surroundings, or for social reasons; to attract a mate or warn off a rival. A recently discovered frog from Ecuador’s west Andean cloud forest plays a similar trick, except it changes its skin texture instead of its color.

The newly described frog, Pristimantis mutabilis, or mutable rainfrog also has company. After the discovery, a known relative of the tiny frog was tested and also demonstrated the ability to change its skin texture to blend in to its surroundings.

The frogs come from the Reserva Las Granaries nature reserve in Ecuador. Katherine and Tim Krynak on an animal survey in the reserve.

The Krynaks spotted the frog, which is about the width of a marble, sitting on a leaf a few feet off the ground on an evening walk in July of 2009. They captured the frog in a cup with a lid and nicknamed it “punk rocker” for the tiny spikes on its skin.

The next morning they placed it on a sheet of smooth white plastic so it could be photographed and found that its skin was smooth. Originally they though that they must have grabbed the wrong frog.

“I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss. The spines came back… we simply couldn’t believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth,” said Katherine Krynak in a statement.

Katherine Krynak thinks that the change in texture, which the frogs can do in just over three minutes, helps the tiny frogs to evade predators.

“The spines and coloration help them blend into mossy habitats, making it hard for us to see them. But whether the texture really helps them elude predators still needs to be tested,” she said.

Because of the animals shape shifting ability, it had to be carefully studied to ensure that it was, in fact, a new species and not previously described with a different skin texture.

Juan M. Guayasamin, from Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica, Ecuador and Carl R. Hutter, from the University of Kansas studied the frog over three years, to show that it was a new species. Their analysis included everything from studying the frogs calls to a genetic and morphological analysis.

Both researchers, along with the Krynaks and field worker Jamie Culebras are listed as authors on the paper describing the species in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Guayasamin and Hutter also found that a previously discovered species, Prismantis sobetes, also has the ability to change its appearance.

The Krynaks, who are among the founders of the Las Gralarias Foundation which helps to support conservation efforts on the reserve, plan to return to do further research on the frogs and document the animals lifestyle, texture shifting and behavior. The researchers also hope to generate an estimate of the population numbers of this newly discovered species.

They will also be on the lookout for other nearby frogs which share this newly documented ability.