“Well, that’s exactly right, because Red Frog Beach Resort, in all its glory, failed. Now, there is really just a hostel. They are under new management, and trying to do more with it, but it’s not really working.”
She explains how the development continued to try to do things their own way, often ruining components of the local Indian community and economy.
Bringing up the famous red frogs that give the area its name, she explains, “The way [the development] handled the red frogs, was that they would try to pick them up and put them somewhere else. That was their environmental plan. This is a place that has coral reefs, mangroves, basically the whole island is a protected national park, and here these guys were trying to build a golf course.”
The red frogs, namesake of the resort and the beach, are the reason I have been drawn to Bastimentos for years. The strawberry poison-dart frog is actually one of the more common poison-dart frogs in Latin America. Its range covers much of lowland Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
But the strawberry frogs – the Oophaga pumilio frogs that live on Bastimentos are unique in that they are extremely variable, the way that feral pigeons in big cities are extremely variable: they come in lots of colors. Some are red with black spots. Some have white arms. Some are orange, some yellow, some are even green.
On a nearby Peninsula, a small population of the same species live right on the beach, and are colored midnight blue. If you expand to other areas of the Caribbean shores of Central America, pumilios can come in black and white, green and yellow, green and black, and on and on.
These extreme variations in color are known as natural-occuring color morphs. Frog collectors in the U.S., Asia and Europe go nuts over Oophaga frogs, and they get particularly excited about Bastimentos pumilios, whose natural variability means breeding options and bloodlines.
As frog species around the world have been plummeting due to a variety of threats, more attention is being made to reptile and amphibian poachers. Several books have made it to print describing a vast and seedy international underworld of poachers, zookeepers and collectors who willingly engage in the most illegal smuggling to get their hands on the latest, the rarest, the hottest reptiles and amphibians.
An orange-colored Strawberry Poison-dart Frog near Red Frog Beach.
An orange-colored Strawberry Poison-dart Frog near Red Frog Beach.
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