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Oophaga pumilio, the strawberry poison frog, is a small, brightly coloured frog of the family Dendrobatidae, native to Central America, ranging from eastern Nicaragua through Costa Rica and Panama, at elevations from sea level up to about 940 m. It is best known for two things: an extraordinary range of colour forms across its range, and a female that returns to feed her own tadpoles for weeks after they hatch.
Identification
This is a small frog measuring about 17-24 mm in adult body length, with four unwebbed digits on each hand and foot and a compact body. Both sexes look alike. The frog is famous for its colour variation: populations across the range show roughly 15 to 30 distinct colour morphs, most of which breed true, from the classic bright red body with blue legs (the “blue jeans” form, the most common across the species’ range) to all-green, yellow, white, orange or black individuals, sometimes with dark mottling on the back. The bright colouring is aposematic, warning predators that the frog is toxic, rather than being camouflage.
Habitat and range
The species occurs from eastern Nicaragua through Costa Rica and Panama, favouring lowland rainforest, and it is also found in cacao and banana groves. It lives near the forest floor in leaf litter but climbs trees and vines, and needs moist habitat with water-filled plants such as bromeliads for tadpole development. Away from intact forest it also turns up in disturbed habitats such as plantations, and it tolerates warmer, more open microhabitats there than most of its forest relatives. It is a diurnal frog, most active in the mornings, and adults are largely sedentary, holding small territories rather than roaming.
Behaviour and breeding
Males hold and defend small territories, about 0.24 to 4.78 square metres, calling to attract females and sometimes wrestling rival males for up to 20 minutes over a prime spot. Diet is entirely animal: adults forage widely for small arthropods, mostly ants with a significant share of mites, catching roughly seven prey items an hour as juveniles, rising to about 14 an hour as adults. Those ants and mites are also the source of the frog’s toxin, a defence the animal manufactures from its diet rather than on its own.
Breeding can happen year-round when conditions are moist. After mating, the female lays three to five eggs in moist leaf litter, and the male keeps them hydrated and clean, returning daily to moisten and rotate them and to remove fungus; the eggs hatch after roughly ten to fourteen days. Once hatched, the female carries the tadpoles one at a time on her back to a separate water-filled hollow, typically inside a bromeliad, placing each tadpole in its own pocket of water to keep siblings from eating one another. She then makes daily visits to lay one to five unfertilised eggs for each tadpole to eat, the tadpole’s only food source, for several weeks until it completes metamorphosis in a total of roughly 43 to 52 days from hatching. Both sexes reach sexual maturity at about ten months old.
Conservation
The IUCN category is shown in the facts box above. The species remains widespread and common across its range, and large populations persist even in disturbed habitat such as plantations. The main pressures are collection for the pet trade and habitat conversion, though wild populations have stayed large enough that trade in wild-caught animals has been largely replaced by captive-bred stock from hobbyist breeders and frog farms.
Similar species
Oophaga pumilio belongs to a small genus of brightly coloured, egg-feeding poison frogs found from Nicaragua to Ecuador; its closest relatives are Oophaga arborea, the polka-dot poison frog, and Oophaga sylvatica, both found farther south in Panama, Colombia and Ecuador and both lacking the extreme colour-morph diversity of O. pumilio within a single, more northerly range. Because O. pumilio itself varies so much between and even within populations, colour alone is not a reliable guide to species in this group; range and the female’s distinctive one-tadpole-per-pocket rearing behaviour are more dependable clues than pattern.