A City of Frogs

Stand in the middle of a tropical forest in Central America. You see many kinds of animals. You see colorful birds and butterflies. You see large animals like jaguars and smaller animals like monkeys. They form part of the forest community.  In a community, many different plants and animals live together and interact with each other. The place where they live is their habitat. Tropical forests have many animals in one place. 

Now go to an island and stand in the middle of a tropical forest. You won’t notice the animals. They exist, but they are not large and colorful. The most common animals in El Yunque are lizards and frogs. They both have an extremely large population. This is the number of one kind of animal that lives in one place at one time. Some people study frogs in forests where temperatures are cool. They find 100 frogs on one acre of land. Biologists in El Yunque find 800 frogs on one acre! This forest is only seven miles long and six miles wide. Yet it has more than 200 million frogs! That is almost as many as the number of people who live in the United States.