Frogs aren't meant to be able to store a mental map in their brains. 20 years ago, Lainy Day from the University of Mississippi, USA, tested the place memory of amphibians and lizards, but none appeared capable of forming complex spatial memories. Frogs' brains were just too simple to carry a map it seemed. However, Sabrina Burmeister from the University of North Carolina recalls remarking at the time that Day should test the memories of poison frogs. After locating tiny pools of water up in the forest canopy, poison frog parents recall the location and return to deliver their freshly hatched tadpoles to develop safely in their new abodes. So, when East Carolina University ecologist Kyle Summers recently sent some green-and-black poison dart frogs (Dendrobates auratus) to Burmeister, she and graduate student Yuxiang Liu decided to investigate the remarkable amphibian's spatial awareness. They publish their discovery that the brain of the poison dart frog is sophisticated enough to form a mental map of its surroundings in Journal of Experimental Biology.
* This article was originally published here
