Oophaga pumilio
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Arenal, aggregated onto a 10 km grid.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
Two centimeters of scarlet with denim legs, the blue jeans frog of Costa Rica's Caribbean lowlands, and behind the cuteness sits one of the most extraordinary parenting operations in the animal kingdom. The female lays a few eggs in leaf litter; when tadpoles hatch, she carries them one at a time on her back, climbing meters up into the trees to deposit each in its own private water pool inside a bromeliad. Then, for weeks, she revisits every nursery and feeds each tadpole unfertilized eggs, the only food they will accept. The toxins in the skin, alkaloids harvested from the ants and mites it eats, make the color an honest warning rather than a bluff.
Diurnal and bold, males calling like insects from low perches and wrestling rivals over territory the size of a doormat.
Get flat to the leaf litter with a macro lens on an overcast morning; the red saturates in soft light. Move slowly and they carry on as if you were furniture.
Do not handle them, for their sake, not yours: your skin oils harm them, and stress interrupts the tadpole-feeding rounds.