A frog was found with mushroom sprouting from its side, leaving scientists baffled

• A tiny frog baffled scientists by growing a mushroom on its side.
• The frog seemed to be living its life unaware of its companion.

Scientists were stunned when they came across a frog with what seemed to be a mushroom sprouting from its side.

The amphibian, a Rao's intermediate golden-backed frog, was spotted by rivers and wetlands specialist Lohit Y.T. during a survey of amphibians in the foothills of the Western Ghats in India.

Rao's intermediate golden-backed frog is a small frog that is endemic to India.

"When I first observed the frog with the mushroom, I was amazed and intrigued by the sight," Lohit told CNN.

"My thought was to document it, as this phenomenon is something we have never heard of. We just wanted this to be a rare incident and not a dangerous phenomenon for the frog," he said.

The frog, sitting atop a twig, seemed content with the mushroom. It was moving around and very much alive, Lohit and his co-author Chinmay C Maliye said in a note reporting their finding.

"To the best of our knowledge, never has a mushroom sprouting from the flank of a live frog been documented," the authors said in their paper.

A mycologist's examination of the pictures first suggested that the mushroom was a common bonnet, which tends to grow on rotting wood. Others have debated the species of mushroom, The New York Times reported.

The reason why this is so peculiar is that only a few species of fungi sprout mushrooms, Matthew Smith, a fungal biologist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the finding, told The Times.

Many will make mycelia, but to sprout a fully formed mushroom, they need to be deeply rooted and have access to the right nutrients.

When it comes to animals, scientists are more attuned to finding fungi inside the body or on the skin, not sprouting out of them.

Smith said he'd never heard of an example of a mushroom growing on animal tissue, per The Times.

"I was very surprised to see it," he said.

Alyssa Wetterau Kaganer, a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, told CNN that she found the discovery fascinating.

"Fungi are dynamic organisms that adapt to changes in their environment, and with exposure to new potential hosts in different environments or climates they may grow in places we hadn't previously expected," she said.

Karthikeyan Vasudevan, chief scientist for the Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Telangana, India, told CNN he initially thought the mushroom was stuck on the frog, but a closer look at the pictures convinced him it was indeed embedded in the skin.

"But one of the possibilities is that there is a small piece of woody debris under the skin of the frog after it got lodged in the skin and it has sprouted a mushroom from it," he said.

Whether the frog continued to live with the mushroom on its side will remain a mystery. The scientists didn't capture the small specimen, which carried on with its life.

Kaganer expects the frog could withstand a local infection, but if the mushroom were to continue to burrow into its skin, it may be spell trouble for the amphibian.

Hopefully, this isn't a new type of infection that is sweeping across Indian frogs. India has been ravaged with an epidemic of a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis which is affecting more than 700 species in India, per CNN.

Frog numbers worldwide have been dwindling with more than 40% of known species now threatened, in part because of the climate crisis and other threats to their environment.

The findings in the peer-reviewed journal Reptiles and Amphibian in January