Titicaca Water Frog

• adaptaciónIts heavily folded skin increases its surface area, so it can absorb more dissolved oxygen straight from the cold, oxygen-poor water of Lake Titicaca.
• It breathes through its skin: its lungs are reduced almost to uselessness and the skin forms hanging folds that multiply the surface available for oxygen exchange, an adaptation needed to live at nearly four thousand metres where the water holds little oxygen. It never surfaces to breathe.
• It does press-ups to breathe better: when oxygen runs short it bobs rhythmically on the bottom to refresh the water around its skin folds.
• In 2016 more than ten thousand dead animals appeared in the Coata river in Peru after pollution discharges: a mass die-off that set every alarm ringing about the state of the lake.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (amphibian)

Habitat & environment

The bed of Lake Titicaca and connected lagoons, between Peru and Bolivia, at 3,800 metres of altitude

Sexual maturity

3 years

Gestation / incubation

Larval development on the lake bed

Litter / clutch size

500 eggs

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telmatobius_culeus