All Angles Creatures
Anura · DendrobatidaeEntry 15,641 of 21,572
Two-toned Poison Frog, Phyllobates bicolor

Amphibia · Anura

Phyllobates bicolorDuméril & Bibron, 1841

Two-toned Poison Frog

Identification not confirmed. One observer recorded this animal as this species and no one has since agreed, so the photograph may show a different animal.

Photograph placed in the public domain, CC0, via iNaturalist

A ground-dwelling, day-active frog reaching 43 mm snout to vent.

Also called Black Leg Poison Dart Frog, Black-legged Poison Dart Frog, Black-legged Poison Frog.

AmphibiaAnuraDendrobatidaePhyllobates

Grows to
42.7mm
greatest recorded
Active
Diurnal
Lives up to
20years
Lives
Terrestrial
Body length across Dendrobatidae

Longer than 97% of all species in Dendrobatidae anyone has measured.

97% of 178 species are smaller3% larger
13.4 mmthe whole family, smallest to largest50 mm

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 13.4 to 50 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

18 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
Endangered
Population trend
Decreasing

as reported by the IUCN Red List

The animal itself

Longest recorded life
20years

Stark and Meiri, 2018, Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr., 27:1384-1397

Size

Length snout to vent · greatest recorded
42.7mm1.75 in

snout-to-vent length, as this source reports for Anura

How it lives

Eats arthropods
Yes

a blank flag in this source means unrecorded, not absent

Eats vertebrates
Unknown
Eats plant matter
Unknown
Active
Diurnal
Where it lives
Terrestrial

Breeding

Reproduction
Oviparous
How the young develop
Through a larval stage
Average clutch
20

midpoint of the reported range — Oliveira, São-Pedro, Santos-Barrera, Penone, and Costa, 2017, Sci. Data, 4:170123

Eggs or young per clutch
17–23eggs
Clutches in a year
1per year
Mature at
1–1.5years

Naming and history

Described by
Duméril & Bibron
Moved to another genus · since it was first described
No
Described in
1841

Keeping one

Two-toned Poison Frog is assessed as 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.

Land
85 × 43cm
Water, at least 4 cm deep
9 × 9cm

Minimum, and for two animals — which is how the standard states it. Bigger is always better. Around 34 cm tall on average.

The standard gives 20 × 10 body lengths of land and 2 × 2 of water, for two animals.

For each further animal the standard asks for another 9 × 9 cm of land and 43 × 9 cm of water.

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.

From this animal’s own snout-vent length, which for a frog is its body length of 1.75 in (42.7 mm) — how this is worked out.

Two-toned Poison Frog

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 female mean
  • Length snout to vent · adult male mean
  • 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
  • Gestation or incubation
  • 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
  • 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 Dendrobatidae

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). Phyllobates bicolor. Retrieved 2026-09-08, from https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/phyllobates-bicolor

@misc{phyllobates_bicolor_2026,
  title  = {Phyllobates bicolor},
  author = {{The Reptile & Amphibian Encyclopedia}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://www.allanglescreatures.com/species/phyllobates-bicolor}
}

Sources

  1. Oliveira, B.F. et al. (2017). AmphiBIO, a global database for amphibian ecological traits. Scientific Data 4:170123. Used under CC BY 4.0.
  2. 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.
  3. GBIF Secretariat. GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Used under CC BY 4.0. Common names aggregated from constituent checklists.
  4. Catalogue of Life (dataset 3LR), used under CC BY.