Strawberry Poison Frog

The strawberry poison frog is a small poison dart frog native to the lowland rainforests of Central America, from eastern Nicaragua through Costa Rica and Panama. It is famous among herpetologists for extreme color polymorphism: isolated island and mainland populations display dozens of distinct color forms, from solid red to the blue-bodied, orange-headed Bocas del Toro morph nicknamed blue jeans. Its skin toxins are alkaloids derived from a diet of ants and mites rather than produced internally, so captive-bred individuals raised on other food lose most of their toxicity. Females show unusually attentive parental care, carrying tadpoles one at a time on their backs to individual water-filled bromeliad pools and returning periodically to feed them unfertilized eggs.