Here a frog, there a frog, everywhere a frog, frog!

Although the first amphibians emerged from ancient seas that covered much of our planet several hundred million years ago, none of the living species inhabit salt water. Twenty-first century amphibians are creatures of a wide diversity of freshwater, forest, desert and mountain environments of good old terra firma. Frogs and toads, in fact, can be found on every continent but one – Antarctica - and are the most widely distributed of the three amphibian orders.

Frogs and toads are able to survive in some rather extreme habitats. At altitudes greater than 12,000 feet in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes, a large aquatic frog makes its home hundreds of feet below the surface of Lake Titicaca’s icy, oxygen-poor waters. At the other end of the spectrum, a number of hardy toad species have adapted to life in the hot, dry desert regions of the world. In their effort to withstand week after week of intense heat and little or no rain, many of these species spend the daytime hours buried underground, where the temperatures are relatively cooler and the chances of drying up are slimmer. Some animals even enter an inactive condition known as aestivation, in which they can remain dormant for a year or more before finally coming to the surface.

Then there are frogs that can live up to a hundred feet above the earth in the canopy layers of the world’s tropical rain forests. Although levels of precipitation are high in such environments, reliable water sources are sometimes hard to find and these species often have to rely on plants like bromeliads to capture the precious raindrops that ensure their survival.