Pithecopus ayeaye

Pithecopus ayeaye
Conservation status
Critically Endangered  (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Amphibia
Order:	Anura
Family:	Phyllomedusidae
Genus:	Pithecopus
Species:	P. ayeaye
Binomial name
Pithecopus ayeaye (Lutz, 1966)
Synonyms
Pithecopus ayeaye (Lutz, 1966) Phyllomedusa ayeaye (Duellman, 1968) Phyllomedusa itacolomi (Caramaschi, Cruz, and Feio, 2006) Pithecopus ayeaye (Duellman, Marion, and Hedges, 2016)

The reticulate leaf frog (Pithecopus ayeaye) is a frog that lives in Brazil.

Appearance

The adult male frog is 35 to 42.6 mm long from nose to rear end and the adult female frog is 41.3 to 46.1 mm long. The frog has green skin with big orange blotches with dark blue or purple around them. The frog gets its name from this reticulated pattern on its skin. This frog has no webbing on any of its four feet, and the climbing disks on its toes are very small.

Habitat and reproduction

This frog lives in small rivers and pools where the water is deep.

When it is time to lay eggs, the frog finds a branch hanging over a pool of water. It builds a nest out of leaves on the branch. It lays eggs in the folded leaves. When the eggs hatch, the tadpoles fall out of the nest into the water.

Threats

Many of the places where this frog lives are protected parks, but it is still endangered.

This frog is endangered because humans change the places it lives into farms and mines and other things, because humans build roads through places the frog lives so that it can't travel from place to place, because of pollution, and because humans use chemicals meant to kill pests and chemicals meant to make crops grow, and these hurt the frog.