Leptodactylus fallax

The Dominican white-lipped frog or mountain chicken (Leptodactylus fallax) is a frog.  It used to live in Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Human beings also tried to bring it to Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Now it only lives on Dominica and Montserrat.

Body
This is one of the biggest frogs. The adult frog can be 210 mm long from nose to rear end. The skin of the frog's back is brown in color. Some frogs have stripes and some do not. The belly is yellow, and the sides of the body are between yellow and brown in color.

Home
These frogs live on the ground.  They live in plants that grow close together in ravines and forests and sometimes big farms. This frog is awake at night. During the day, it hides in holes that it digs in the ground.  Scientists saw the frog between 0 and 430 meters above sea level.

Scientists saw the frog in some protected places: Kaieteur National Park and Parque Nacional Canaima.

Food
This frog eats many kinds of insects, millipedes, spiders, and snails. It can also eat other frogs and snakes.

People
People used to catch this frog to eat. This is why people call it "mountain chicken" in English. Some years, people caught thousands of frogs. Before the frog became in danger of dying out, mountain chicken was the national dish of Dominica.

Young

The male frogs fight each other for good places to dig holes to build nests. They have one call that sounds like "whoop" for fighting and one call that sounds like a trilling bark for calling to females.  The male and female frog make a nest out of bubbles for its eggs. Because the nest is in the hole and not in water, the tadpoles cannot swim away. They stay in the nest until they grow into young froglets. The female frog stays with the nest except when she goes to eat. The male frog stays near the hole to fight animals that want to eat the eggs. The female frog moves her legs to keep the nest bubbly. After the tadpoles hatch, the tadpoles move their tails to keep the nest bubbly. There are 26-43 tadpoles in each nest. The female frog lays eggs that will not hatch for the tadpoles to eat. She will push the tadpoles with her feet so that they all get to eat. These tadpoles are the largest in Leptodactylus: to be the longest of any species in the genus 110 mm with the tail.

Danger
Scientists from the IUCN say this frog is in very big danger of dying out.

There were many of these frogs before the 1990s, but then 80 percent of them died. Human beings caught many frogs to eat and changed the places where the frogs lived.  In 1995, some frogs still lived on Montserrat, but then the volcanoes there erupted. Lava burned and changed the frogs' homes, and falling ash killed young froglets.  Then, in 2004, the dangerous fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis came to Montserrat. People brought bananas from another place, and scientists think there were sick frogs sitting in the banana bunches. Then L. fallax caught the dangerous chytridiomycosis sickness from these frogs.

The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Zoological Society of London, Chester Zoo, Norden's Ark, Paignton Zoo, and the governments of Montserrat and Dominica worked together to save the frog.  They made the Mountain Chicken Recovery Programme  in 2008. They caught frogs to grow tadpoles in zoos.  Dominica made laws saying that no one could catch the frogs to eat or bring mongooses to the island. Scientists from the IUCN Green List think this frog population could grow back if the frogs stay healthy. Scientists from the IUCN and the Venezuela Red List say this frog is not in fclittle danger of dying out.  The frogs might be in some danger when people dig good rocks out of the ground.

References

Category:Frogs of South America