Oophaga pumilio
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Arenal, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
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, with the widest coverage in May. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 18 squares of 10 km carry records for Strawberry Poison-dart Frog in and around Arenal, and the 99 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
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.
Do not handle them, for their sake, not yours: your skin oils harm them, and stress interrupts the tadpole-feeding rounds.