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Lake Titicaca Frog — printable fact sheet
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Lake Titicaca Frog
Telmatobius culeus
Telmatobius culeus lives entirely underwater in Lake Titicaca, 3,800 m up on the Peru-Bolivia border, where the air holds barely two-thirds the oxygen of sea level and the water is cold year-round. It has adapted by growing far more skin than it needs: the body hangs in loose, b…
Did you know?
- The Lake Titicaca Frog is so uniquely adapted to its environment that it can suffocate if taken out of water for too long.
- Jacques Cousteau's 1969 expedition to Lake Titicaca reported enormous numbers of these frogs at depth, some estimated at over 50 cm with legs extended; nothing on that scale has been seen since. The frog's skin folds are so extensive that the animal looks several sizes too big for itself, and captive individuals in oxygenated tanks develop noticeably less baggy skin. It is one of the very few frogs anywhere that is fully and permanently aquatic as an adult with no lung-based breathing to speak of.
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