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Ceratophrys ornata, the Argentine horned frog, is a stocky, big-mouthed frog of the family Ceratophryidae. It is endemic to south-eastern South America, found in the grasslands of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil. Its huge gape has made it one of the best-known members of the genus Ceratophrys, both to naturalists and, under the nickname “pacman frog,” to the exotic pet trade, where it is widely kept.
Identification
The frog’s mouth is its defining feature: it accounts for roughly half of the animal’s overall size, giving the species its arcade-game nickname. Exact size figures sit in the facts box above; females grow noticeably larger than males, a common pattern in the genus. The body is typically bright green with red markings, though dark green, parti-coloured black, and all-red variants also occur. The hindlimbs are short and lack webbing, which makes the frog a poor swimmer and keeps it a ground-dweller rather than a pond frog.
The sexes can be told apart beyond size alone: males have dark-pigmented throats and nuptial pads on the forelimbs, the pads used to grip a female during mating. Along the jaws sit several odontoid projections, bony points rather than true teeth, that let the frog deliver a surprisingly painful bite to anything unwise enough to handle it carelessly.
Habitat and range
This species lives on the ground in grassland habitats, where it stays motionless, partly buried, and ambushes passing prey. It is an opportunistic sit-and-wait predator: vertebrates make up roughly half of an adult’s diet in the wild, alongside insects and other invertebrates. Reported wild prey includes mice, passerine birds, small reptiles, large spiders and locusts, and the frog is not a cautious eater: it will attempt to swallow anything that moves close to its mouth, even prey too large to safely finish.
Its range covers the grasslands of Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, the only part of the world where it occurs.
Behaviour and breeding
Outside the ambush posture it keeps for hunting, most of what is recorded about this species concerns reproduction. A female lays roughly 2,000 eggs in water, and tadpoles emerge within about two weeks of laying. As with courtship, the male’s nuptial pads keep him attached to the female through fertilisation.
In the wild, the species is reported to live six to seven years, with captive individuals sometimes reaching ten years or more under the steadier food supply and absence of predators that captivity provides. That resilience in captivity is part of why the species does so well as a pet: its natural diet of crickets, earthworms and mice is fairly easy to recreate without the grassland burrow it would dig for itself in the wild.
Conservation
The IUCN category is in the facts box above. Wikidata’s most recent assessment supersedes an earlier “near threatened” listing carried on the same item, reflecting a downgrade in the species’ status since that assessment. No specific threat, such as habitat conversion to agriculture or collection for the pet trade, is documented in the sources checked for this page; the category above, not any unsourced explanation, is the reliable figure.
Similar species
Within the genus Ceratophrys, several other so-called horned frogs share the same wide-mouthed build and are also kept as pets under the “pacman frog” nickname, which makes captive animals harder to tell apart by name alone than by looking closely at colour and range. In the wild, Ceratophrys ornata is distinguished by its South American grassland range and, most reliably, by the bright green base colour with red markings typical of the species, against the plainer or differently patterned colouring of its genus-mates.