The bizarre behavior of this poorly studied species was originally described in the scientific journal Copeia by investigators from the University of the West Indies in Kingston. Animal behavior defies our imagination. A decade ago, no one was aware that an animal existed in which the female lays her eggs deep in a cave, attends them for a month, and then carries the babies out of the cave on her back. The phenomenon was not mentioned in encyclopedias, textbooks, or nature magazines. The behavior of the Jamaican frog in a cave in the West Indies was still to be discovered by science.
Most people think of scientific publications as being dry and dull, at best.
Yet such journals are where the authentic records of the most exciting events in the animal world are first reported and confirmed. Copeia, named after the famous naturalist Edward Drinker Cope, is the oldest professional journal focusing exclusively on fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. Frogs do some weird things reproductively, such as carrying their developing babies in their mouth or on their back. Some tropical frogs lay their eggs on leaves above the water, and upon hatching, the young fall into the water below as tadpoles. A group of frogs in tropical America lay single eggs in water that has collected at the base of leaves of living plants and return repeatedly to deposit unfertilized eggs as food for the developing tadpoles.