This medium-sized frog, perhaps 3 inches long, will get much larger, large enough to eat frogs and snakes and whatever it can stuff into its gaping maw. They are popular in the pet trade for their attractive colors and large size. Herpetologist Bill Lamar of GreenTracks told me that the name "Smokey Jungle Frog" was an old pet-trade name that caught on since there was no better common name in use by herpetologists. You have to admit, "Smokey Jungle Frog" is a pretty cool name.

Here is a complete list of the species we found on this GreenTracks trip.

This was a huge frog, perhaps 7 inches long. (Bill said that it was just a little one compared to the monstrously large ones he'd seen in Peru, but hey, I've never been to Peru.) It was sitting near the side of the dirt road through the park at night when we came across it. It made a surprisingly loud, surprisingly un-frog-like squeal when I grabbed it, in a futile attempt to scare me into letting go so it could leap away. I put it in a big plastic bag and deposited it in the closet area in my cabin, along with a few other bags with other herps, so we could take pictures the next day. It was not content to sit there, and spent most of the night hopping around my room, taking the big plastic bag for a ride.

Now I have been in Peru, but the first Smokey Jungle Frog I saw there was this small one, about three inches long. At first I thought it might be Leptodactylus knudseni, but its dorsolateral ridges extend all the way back (past the sacrum, to the groin), which is a characteristic that distinguishes these two species.

Here is a complete list of the herps I saw in the wild on this Margarita Tours trip.

This was a large individual, though not as large as the big one I had seen in Costa Rica. The eyes of these nocturnal frogs have a light-catching property that causes them to often reflect bright red when photographed with a flash.

On our last night at Santa Cruz, Mitch Berk and I saw this monster frog, no doubt the largest frog I've ever seen in the wild. I estimated it at the size of a bowling ball, though it's not impossible that this was a slight exaggeration. When we got back to camp, I was telling Marisa Ai Ishimatsu that I had seen the largest Smokey Jungle Frog that anyone had ever seen, and no doubt the largest one that had ever existed. And did she believe me? No! She dared to argue, claiming that *she* had seen one that very evening so huge that it was impossible that mine was bigger. I bumped up my claims for emphasis, saying that it had been at least the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, but still she would not do the honorable thing and simply agree that the frog I had seen was clearly larger than the one she had seen.

Then she paused and asked "Was your frog in that big pile of broken-up vegetation right near the beginning of the Viper Trail?". Sure enough, we had each seen the same frog.