When you think of Costa Rica, your mind wanders from world-class sport fishing and pristine beaches; to lush tropical forests with 100 meter tall waterfalls, parrots flying overhead, and toucans and monkeys dropping palm nuts from tree tops.

If you focus your attention close up on the trees and the leaf litter, a new fascinating world can will be opened up to you.

Depending on the source, Costa Rica can be home to more than 12 climactic zones.  These varied zones provide the perfect weather and rainfall for around 400 species of reptiles and amphibians.  A diverse group of animals; reptiles and amphibians flourish on this land bridge, because of their unique physiological adaptations for the region.

While everyone loves a cute little jaguar cub, or a baby monkey, not everyone appreciates the importance or beauty of reptiles and amphibians.  This unfortunate truth allows many of them to go unexplored and not researched.  Project Green Jungle is working hard to change that.

So many things can be learned from the research of reptiles and amphibians:

• Because of how amphibians respirate through their skin, they are on the front lines of environmental indication.  Telling us when the environment is degrading
• Reptiles and amphibians both use their adaptations to survive.  Bio-mimicry, modified salivas(venom), skin toxins, and even skin color all assist these animals to flourish in the predator rich environments they live.
• Because of their varying status as predator and prey, reptiles and amphibians are present throughout the food chain, making them important to even more species and the ecosystem they live in as a whole.

So what is the project doing?

Project Green Jungle is hard at work doing the most important research needed:

Finding out exactly what animals are out there!

We have determined that there is startlingly little population information available on places even as popular as Costa Rica.  So we have developed a program to survey carefully chosen areas of the country to determine what types of animals, and in what populations are in the country.

What can you do?

Currently we are looking for corporate and personal sponsors of our field research.  Each time we head to the jungle, we do everything possible to keep our costs to a minimum, but we are constantly in need of animal handling equipment, and help with our travel expenses.  To this point, the people conducting our surveys have operated largely out of pocket, and are in need of assistance.  If you are interested in helping out, please go to the general donation page HERE.

For more information on our exciting biological surveys go HERE.

Below are some photos of some of the reptiles and amphibians we have seen on our trips.

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