Wallace’s flying frog

The flying frog is another creature like the flying squirrels, lemurs and the flying lizards that doesn’t fly so much as a glide through the air with specially designed skin flaps that help it catch air and glide. There are more than a few species of frog that can glide. One of the earliest discovered was Wallace’s flying frog, named after its discoverer. Others are the Annam flying frog and the Chinese and Javan gliding frogs. These frogs prefer to spend their whole lives in the trees (where their evironment is moist enough and insects are available to eat) but being frogs they still need to breed and lay their eggs in water when the time comes around.

Javan gliding frog

Wallace’s flying frog is about 4 inches long (10 cm) and has bright colored green, yellow and white skin and large eyes. This frog enjoys gliding from tree to tree in southeast Asian rainforests. It has a long slim body with long legs. Its feet are even more elongated and the digits spread out so that the skin of their webbed feet create big air-catching disks. They usually glide down diagonally from one tree to the next and can reportedly glide up to 50 ft (15 m). At some point they presumably have to climb back up the trees in order to launch off again but that isn’t the fun part.