I appreciate the sentiment, if not all the implications, of the professor who commented for this amazing story in today’s New York Times story (in the “N.Y. /Region” section, for reasons you need to click through to understand):

“Here is a brand-new species, and it’s not a species of bacteria or a barely visible insect,” said H. Bradley Shaffer, a professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It’s a big amphibian, and kids have probably been catching and playing with it for years,” he said. “Even in an urban center like New York, where herpetologists have tromped all over for a century or more, there can be new species out there. That shows the importance of urban areas in terms of conservation and biodiversity.”

While I do not have a soft spot for bacteria, per se, they are part of biodiversity not to mention our health.  Insects, I do not need to mention, are a major source of celebration on this site.  In a lifetime of listening to and reading stories about diminishing amphibian species, this one provides a bit of a smile to my day.  Naive, but reasonable, I think.