Golden mantella
Mantella aurantiaca
— Where the name comes from
Mantella is a diminutive of the Latin mantellum, the cloak: it alludes to the uniform colour that covers the animal like a garment. Aurantiaca means “orange-coloured”. These are Malagasy frogs that closely resemble the American poison frogs without being related to them: two very distant groups that arrived at the same livery for the same reason.
— Facts
- Group
- Amphibians · Amphibia
- Order
- Frogs and toads
- Habitat
- Pandanus bogs inside rainforest
- Range
- Eastern Madagascar, a handful of sites near Moramanga
- Size
- 2–3.1 cm, 2–4 g
- Diet
- Ants, termites, mites, midges
- Lifespan
- 8 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It is active by day and does not hide: it relies on colour to be left alone.
- 02
Its toxicity comes from the ants and mites it eats.
- 03
In captivity, fed on crickets, it loses its poison entirely.
— What sets it apart
It invented the same thing twice. Like the poison frogs of South America it does not make its own toxin but gathers it from the arthropods it feeds on and concentrates it in the skin, and like them it has adopted a colour meaning “do not eat me”: yet the two groups parted more than a hundred million years ago, when Madagascar was still attached to Africa. Its problem is space: it lives in a few bogs totalling a few square kilometres, and that is all it has.
