Naming species before they disappear.

More than beautiful frogs.

Poison frogs are famous because they look impossible: tiny bodies painted in black, yellow, orange, red, and green. But colour is only the beginning. In the Colombian Chocó, those patterns can signal geography, evolutionary history, genetic boundaries, predator warning, and conservation urgency.

In a 2017 paper in Evolution, Posso-Terranova and Andrés explored how aposematic colour patterns can diversify and converge rapidly in harlequin poison frogs. The study connected visible colour differences to deeper biological mechanisms, including truncated receptors and cellular arrangements that help produce repeated warning signals.

My work on Oophaga poison frogs combines field sampling, morphology, colour variation, ecological niche data, microsatellites, transcriptome-derived markers, and genome-scale thinking to ask a deceptively simple question: when does a colour pattern represent local variation, and when does it reveal an evolutionary lineage?

Colour as evolutionary evidence.

The Evolution paper adds an essential layer to the poison frog story: colour is not only beautiful, and not only useful for identification. In aposematic frogs, colour is a biological language shaped by selection, cellular architecture, and molecular change.

By studying diversification and convergence of colour patterns in harlequin poison frogs, this work helped frame warning coloration as an evolutionary trait that can change rapidly, repeat across lineages, and still carry information about history, ecology, and adaptation.

Hybrid frogs, not human mistakes.

Follow-up work in Molecular Ecology examined the origin of striking Colombian poison frog hybrids. Rather than being treated as accidental products of recent human movement or wildlife trafficking, the hybrids revealed a deeper evolutionary story: divergence, gene flow, warning colour, and natural hybridization interacting across the rainforest landscape.

This matters because conservation policy often treats human-caused hybrids very differently from naturally occurring hybrid lineages. In this case, the genetic evidence supported the idea that the hybrid populations are part of the evolutionary history of these frogs — not a conservation inconvenience to be erased.

The conclusion was elegant and important: the hybrids, Oophaga anchicayensis, and Oophaga lehmanni all deserve protection as living pieces of Colombia’s evolutionary diversity.