Atelognathus patagonicus

Appearance

The adult measures about 50 mm in snout-vent length. The skin of the dorsum is brown or green in color with dark spots. Their bellies are also notably orange in color.

Range and habitat

Its natural habitats are permanent lagoons surrounded by steppe and/or semidesert. It is endemic to the volcanic tablelands of Neuquén Province, western Argentina.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

The adult frogs eat invertebrates. This may be the cause of the yellow ventral areas of aquatic frogs.

Littoral frogs eat insects and arachnids that they find on land. The tadpoles swim in shallow water and eat tiny animals and algae.

In crisis

The population in the Laguna Blanca (in the Laguna Blanca National Park), that used to be the main subpopulation, has been extirpated by introduced by fish (perch and salmonids). Even so, other subpopulations, located within the buffer zone of the Laguna Blanca National Park, occur in isolated ponds and mostly appear to be stable. Even so, eutrophication is a problem in some ponds, and introductions of predatory fish pose a risk to all remaining subpopulations.

Chytrid fungus, collection, and wet-forest loss are the usual pressures on frogs with a high threat category.

Atelognathus patagonicus is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Atelognathus patagonicus, Wikidata item Q2208717. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.