Black-legged dart frog

Appearance

Black-legged dart frog, or more commonly referred to as the black-legged poison dart frog, is the world's second-most toxic dart frog. Even so, Black-legged dart frog is identifiable by the yellow or orange body and black or dark blue forelimbs and hindlegs, hence the name black-legged dart frog. Black-legged dart frog are commonly found in tropical forests of the Chocó region of Colombia.

Range and habitat

The diurnal frogs live along the rainforest ground near streams or puddles that form. Due to this highly deadly toxin that the frogs secrete, many indigenous groups of the Colombian rainforest have extracted the toxins to create poison tipped darts used for hunting. Currently, deforestation, habitat loss, and pollution pose the biggest threat to the species.

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

Diet and breeding

Oftentimes, the male will select a suitable location for female oviposition prior to the mate actually depositing her eggs. In addition to moving the tadpoles to water, the toxins on the father's back rub off onto the tadpoles, so if a predator were to eat one of the offspring, the predator would get poisoned and the rest of the frogs would be protected.

During the breeding period, P. Bicolor emits high pitched single notes as a mating call. Despite this, there are still institutions such as the Baltimore National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland and the Tatamá National Natural Park in Colombia that are engaged in P. Bicolor conservation efforts such as captive breeding.

In crisis

P. Bicolor is an endangered species according to the IUCN red list. P. Bicolor currently faces a major threat of habitat loss. The presence of terrestrial and aquatic forms of the fungi present a great threat to P. Bicolor.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

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

Black-legged dart frog is 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 Phyllobates bicolor, Wikidata item Q141616. 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.