Description: Very varied, often very bright red, pink, blue, green, gold, purple with darker markings; some with flash colors around groin.

Range/Habitat: Central and South America from Costa Rica to southern Brazil. Poison frogs are among the most successful of tropical frogs in many regards, yet most species have very small geographical ranges.

Adaptations: Poison frogs have few predators, and for good reason. Instances are known where a snake has been seen to bite into a poison frog, only to immediately release it (spit it out, actually) and begin to rub the lip scales on the ground while writhing about in obvious pain. Occasionally the snake predator became comatose for several minutes or even hours if it bit into a particularly toxic species of poison frog, while the frog itself just hopped or walked away virtually unharmed except for a few shallow bite marks.
The presence of skin toxins has directed the lives of poison frogs. Because they lack predators they can be active during the daytime, allowing males to establish long-term territories from which they call to attract females.
There are only three, out of sixty-five species, that are used by local Amerindians to tip the darts for their blowguns. Yes, blowguns and darts, not bows and arrows. Though some Amerindian tribes from the Amazon basin probably were using bows and arrows before Europeans entered their realm, all available evidence indicates that the various Colombian tribes who use poison frog toxins for hunting and warfare have always used blowguns. The traditional common name for the poison frogs, poison-arrow frogs, thus is based on a misconception and was replaced by some writers with the more correct name poison-dart frogs in the early 1980�s. Very quickly, however writers began to invert the order of the words in the names to the grammatically more accurate dart-poison or arrow-poison frogs.

Courtship/Gestation/Birth: They lead long lives once they mature (some have lived up to nine years), and specialized care of the eggs and often the tadpoles lead to a high percentage of eggs producing adult frogs.

Diet: Small insects such as flies, beetles, aphids, small crickets, etc.

Card by Henson Robinson Zoo Education Department.

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