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| Striped Rocket Frog (Allobates talamancae) |
| Photo by iNaturalist user "wasatch_hunter" |
| Used under Creative Commons License granted in this iNat record |
The Striped Rocket Frog (Allomantes talamancae) is a tiny species of dart frog found Costa Rica, Panama, and then west of the Andes in western Colombia and northwestern Ecuador.
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| range map from iNaturalist (2024) |
Even for dart frogs, these frogs are small. An adult is probably less than 1cm long and they are almost invisible hopping around on leaf litter on the forest floor.
The name "Rocket Frog" comes presumably from the ability of these little frogs to "rocket" around the forest floor under your feet. Unfortunately, this could lead to confusion with the totally unrelated "Rocketfrogs" of the genus Litoria in Australia. Unlike Allobates, the much larger Australian Litoria really do shoot off like a rocket when disturbed. The best an Allobates can muster is a few short hops, but common names are often given without much forethought?
These little frogs are quite common on the leaf litter of the forest floor in wet tropical forests in their range. But they are so small they are difficult to see as they hop around the ground. However, if you know their call, you can hear them everywhere on wet days!
One of the many remarkable things about these tiny frogs is their parental care. Females lay eggs off the ground in epiphytes and other water-holding areas on plants and trees. When the eggs hatch, the male frog will climb into the "pool" and collect the tadpoles onto their back. They then carry the larvae on their back down to a stream where they are released to continue their development. This system protects the babies when they are in their most vulnerable stage (in the egg) and gives them a much greater chance of survival. They don't have to face predators in the stream until they are mobile enough to escape and hide. It is really amazing to find one of these tiny anurans hopping around the forest floor with minuscule little tadpoles on their back!
Like many other dart frogs, this species is active day and night and calls from the forest floor much of the day. The call is a whistled double "pee-deep" call as well. These calling Striped Rocket Frogs called most of they day from the forest floor undergrowth in this area of Anton Valley, Panama.
Striped Rocket Frogs making the double "pee-deep" call
One a spectrogram of this call, you can see the two part call at around 4kHz. Each note has a slight upward slur to it.
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© Chris Harrison 2024
iNaturalist. Available from https://www.inaturalist.org. Accessed August 12, 2024
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