Atelopus arthuri

The toad

True toads are stocky amphibians with warty skin and parotoid glands. Breeding is usually explosive and aquatic.

Frogs and toads typically begin as aquatic tadpoles, though some families lay eggs on land and hatch as froglets. Skin and eggs both need moisture.

Range and habitat

Atelopus arthuri, Arthur's stubfoot toad, is a toad in the family Bufonidae endemic to Ecuador. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist montane forests, subtropical or tropical high-altitude grasslands, and rivers. It is threatened by habitat loss.

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

Breeding

Calling males and egg sites define most frog field work. A species known from one ridge is as narrow as it sounds.

Eggs and damp skin make amphibians quick to vanish from a drained wetland or a forest stripped of litter.

In crisis

It has not been seen since the nineteen eighties and is considered probably extinct.

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

Atelopus arthuri 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 Atelopus arthuri — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q2236430. 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.