Aromobates duranti

Durant's rocket frog (Aromobates duranti) is a frog.  It lives near La Culata in the Andes Mountains in Venezuela.

Home
This frog is awake during the day. It lives near streams in grassy places called páramo and subpáramo and in cloud forests. The frog lives in shady places with many plants and rocks. Sometimes the frog lives in water that does not move. Scientists saw the frog between 2600 and 3000 meters above sea level.

The frog lives near one protected place, Sierra de La Culata National Park but scientists do not know if it lives in the park.

Young
The female frog lays her eggs on land. The male frog watches the eggs. After the eggs hatch, the male frogs carry the tadpoles to pools near the streams.

Danger
Scientists say this frog is in very big danger of dying out.  They say it is because a few things happened at the same time in the 1980s: The El Niño ocean current changed the weather where the frog lives, making it drier.  At the same time, the dangerous fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis came to the frogs' home. This fungus can give frogs and other amphibians the fungal disease chytridiomycosis.  Climate change might have made this worse. People also change the places where the frog lives to make farms and places for people to raise animals. Visitors also come to the places where the frog lives, and they leave their waste behind.

Scientists caught some of the frogs and took them to the REVA Conservation Center. They plan to raise tadpoles and put healthy adult frogs back in the wild.

References

Category:Frogs of South America