Amphibia · Anura
Gastrotheca litonedisDuellman & Hillis, 1987
Busa Marsupial Frog
Photograph by oSKÄr, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
A frog reaching 59 mm snout to vent.
Also called Azuay Marsupial Frog, Azuay marsupial frog, Big head marsupial frog.
Amphibia › Anura › Hemiphractidae › Gastrotheca
- Grows to
- 59mm
- greatest recorded
- Lives up to
- 3.1years
- Lives
- Aquatic, terrestrial
- Red List
- Critically Endangered
Longer than only 45% of all species in Hemiphractidae anyone has measured.
The bar is the rank itself: its length is the share of the family this animal exceeds. The chart below is the family’s real spread, on a logarithmic scale because body length here runs from 24 to 99.4 mm. The solid rule is this animal. Every bar is a count of real species, and nothing on this figure is estimated.
What is known
16 sourced facts, each taken from a named scientific dataset. How to read these.
Cited from a dataset unless a row is marked otherwise.
Standing in the world
- Conservation status
- Critically Endangered
- Population trend
- Decreasing
as reported by the IUCN Red List
The animal itself
- Longest recorded life
- 3.1years
Slavens and Slavens, 1999. Reptiles and Amphibians in Captivity: Breeding - Longevity and Inventory, Slaveware, 400 p.
Size
- Length snout to vent · greatest recorded
- 59mm2.25 in
- Length snout to vent · adult female mean
- 58mm2.25 in
- Length snout to vent · adult male mean
- 53.8mm2 in
snout-to-vent length, as this source reports for Anura
mean adult female snout-to-vent length
mean adult male snout-to-vent length
How it lives
- Eats arthropods
- Unknown
- Eats vertebrates
- Unknown
- Eats plant matter
- Unknown
- Where it lives
- Aquatic, terrestrial
a blank flag in this source means unrecorded, not absent
Breeding
- Reproduction
- Oviparous
- How the young develop
- Through a larval stage
- Clutches in a year
- 1per year
Naming and history
- Described by
- Duellman & Hillis
- Moved to another genus · since it was first described
- No
- Described in
- 1987
Keeping one
Busa Marsupial Frog is assessed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Species at risk in the wild are often covered by CITES and by national law, which decide what may be bought, sold, moved across a border or kept at all — and captive-bred and wild-caught animals are usually treated differently. Check the rules where you are before acquiring one. Nothing below is a judgement about keeping this species; it is what a published welfare standard says about space, and what the animal itself was measured doing.
No enclosure size is given here
Swiss law sets amphibian enclosure sizes family by family, and this family is not among the ones its table names. No figure is given rather than one borrowed from a different kind of animal.
Swiss Tierschutzverordnung (TSchV), SR 455.1, Anhang 2, Tabelle 6 — legally binding minimum enclosure sizes for amphibians, given as multiples of total body length and stated for two animals.
What nobody knows
These are not gaps in our research. No scientific dataset records them for this species — and saying so is information you cannot get from a reference that simply leaves a field out.
- — Still living
- — Length snout to vent · adult mean
- — Length nose to tail · greatest recorded
- — Female length · mean, nose to tail
- — Length nose to tail · adult male mean
- — Length nose to tail · adult mean
- — Largest female · snout to vent
- — Largest male · snout to vent
- — Largest female · shell length
- — Largest male · shell length
- — Hatchling length · snout to vent
- — Hatchling length · nose to tail
- — Largest juvenile · snout to vent
- — Largest juvenile · shell length
- — Egg length
- — Egg width
- — Body mass · greatest
- — Body mass · a typical adult
- — Body mass · adult female, mean
- — Body mass at hatching
- — Preferred body temperature · chosen in a laboratory gradient
- — Body temperature when active · measured in the wild
- — Diet
- — How it hunts
- — Active
- — Gestation or incubation
- — Average clutch
- — Smallest clutch recorded
- — Largest clutch recorded
- — Mean clutch · smallest reported
- — Mean clutch · largest reported
- — Clutches a year · fewest
- — Clutches a year · most
- — First breeds from · youngest recorded
- — First breeds by · oldest recorded
- — Hatchling length · smallest recorded
- — Hatchling length · largest recorded
- — Age at first breeding · female
- — Mature from · youngest recorded
- — Mature by · oldest recorded
- — Size at maturity · smallest recorded
- — Size at maturity · largest recorded
- — Venomous
- — Fangs
- — Body temp in the wild · lowest mean recorded
- — Body temp in the wild · highest mean recorded
- — Limbs
- — Colour on the back
- — Pattern on the back
- — Pupil
- — Sex decided by
- — Status assessed · the year the Red List last looked
- — Red List criteria
- — Region
- — Biome
- — Active season · shortest recorded
- — Active season · longest recorded
- — Density · lowest recorded
- — Density · highest recorded
- — Home range · largest recorded
- — Suborder
- — Infraorder
- — Subspecies
- — Type locality
- — Habitat
- — Active in
- — Mainland or island
- — Lowest it lives · above sea level
- — Highest it lives · above sea level
- — Range size
Others in Hemiphractidae
Take this data
Everything on this page is available as data under CC BY 4.0 — use it freely, credit it, no permission needed.
This species as JSON · the whole dataset
Cite this page
The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia (2026). Gastrotheca litonedis. Retrieved 2026-09-08, from https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/gastrotheca-litonedis
@misc{gastrotheca_litonedis_2026,
title = {Gastrotheca litonedis},
author = {{The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/gastrotheca-litonedis}
}Sources
- Oliveira, B.F. et al. (2017). AmphiBIO, a global database for amphibian ecological traits. Scientific Data 4:170123. Used under CC BY 4.0.
- GBIF Secretariat. GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Used under CC BY 4.0. Common names aggregated from constituent checklists.
- Catalogue of Life (dataset 3LR), used under CC BY.
- Huang, N. et al. (2023). Amphibian traits database: a global database on morphological traits of amphibians. Global Ecology and Biogeography 32, 633-641. Used under CC BY 4.0.
- Moura, M. R. et al. TetrapodTraits: a database of 33,281 tetrapod species. Used under CC BY 4.0. Observed values only; this encyclopedia does not publish its imputed predictions.