Meet the Mottled Clown Tree Frog…

While in the Colombian Amazon, I visited an Indigenous community just outside of Leticia. The first night I was there, one of the local members showed me a walking trail that stretched into the jungle for several kilometres out the back of their community. I spent every night traipsing along that path for hours and seeing what I could find.

One of my favourite discoveries was the adorable frog pictured here. These frogs are absolutely stunning. They’re only a couple of centimetres in size, and they look like someone took a regular frog and then covered it in shimmery golden flakes.

That’s why I was particularly annoyed to go home and discover that despite being one of the most magically mesmerising frogs I’ve ever seen, its common name is the Mottled Clown Tree Frog.

This frog spent millions of years evolving a fantastically fanciful golden pattern, only for some grumpy frog scientist to come along and go, “You look like a splotchy clown – that’s your name now.”

No wonder this one looks like it’s having an existential crisis.

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Mottled Clown Tree Frog (Dendropsophus sarayacuensis), Leticia, Colombia 🇨🇴