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The mountain chicken frog, Leptodactylus fallax, is one of the largest frogs on Earth, so named because its meat was once said to taste like chicken — a reputation that, alongside a devastating fungal disease, has pushed it to the brink of extinction. It is native to Dominica and Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean, the last two islands where it survives after disappearing from the rest of its former Lesser Antillean range.
Identification
Adults can reach a snout-vent length of up to about 220 mm, with typical individuals around 170-180 mm, making this one of the biggest frog species in the world; the facts box carries the full figure. Its bulk and powerful hind legs set it apart from every other frog sharing its Caribbean range, and its common name reflects both its size and its history as a traditional food source on the islands where it survives.
Habitat and range
The species keeps to moist habitats including dense secondary forest and scrub, hillside plantations, palm groves in river valleys, ravines and flooded forest, usually staying close to streams and springs. On Dominica it has been recorded up to about 400 m elevation, favouring lower-lying, well-watered ground over higher terrain. It was once more widespread across the Lesser Antilles, with historical records from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Kitts and Nevis, but it is now restricted to Dominica and Montserrat.
Behaviour and breeding
L. fallax is a sit-and-wait predator, taking crickets, other insects, millipedes, crustaceans, tarantulas and even small vertebrates such as frogs, snakes and bats. Breeding is entirely terrestrial: males wrestle each other for burrows about 50 cm deep and call to attract females, then paddle fluid into a foam nest with their hind legs, a job that takes 9-14 hours to complete. The female lays her eggs in the foam and tends the nest, renewing it while the tadpoles develop inside by feeding on up to 25,000 unfertilised trophic eggs she continues to provide, rather than on pond algae. After about 45 days, the burrow releases 26 to 43 froglets as the wet season begins; a female raises one brood a year, while a male may father several.
Conservation
The species’ facts box carries its current IUCN Red List category, Critically Endangered, reflecting one of the fastest amphibian collapses on record. Chytrid fungus disease reached Dominica in 2002 and drove the population there to near-extinction within about 18 months; it reached Montserrat a few years later and by 2019 the species was considered functionally extinct on that island. Before the disease struck, annual hunting for food had already removed an estimated 8,000 to 36,000 animals a year, a practice not fully banned until 2003, and volcanic eruptions on Montserrat destroyed habitat outside the island’s Centre Hills. By 2004 the total population was estimated at around 8,000, falling to fewer than 200 individuals on Dominica by 2017-2019, with captive-breeding programmes now holding further individuals in Europe as an insurance population.
Similar species
No other frog native to Dominica or Montserrat approaches the mountain chicken frog’s size, so within its range its sheer bulk is usually enough for identification. Elsewhere in the Lesser Antilles, where it has disappeared, smaller Eleutherodactylus species occupy similar forest habitats but lack its scale and terrestrial foam-nesting habits.