🐾 LandCare difficulty: AdvancedLegal complexity: High — restricted in many states
Purple frog
Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis
The purple frog is a bizarre, bloated burrowing amphibian from India's Western Ghats that spends almost its entire life underground. A 'living fossil' representing an ancient lineage, it is endangered by habitat conversion and emerges only briefly to breed.
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Quick facts
| Size | Bloated burrowing frog ~7 cm, purplish with a pointed snout. |
| Lifespan | 8–12 years |
| Native region | Western Ghats, India |
| Climate | 🌴 Tropical |
| Genus | Nasikabatrachus |
Habitat & enclosure
Endemic to the Western Ghats, where it lives buried in soil and surfaces only during the monsoon to breed in streams. Conversion of forest to plantations and agriculture, plus collection of its tadpoles in some areas, threaten it. It is strictly protected; this profile is conservation/education only.
Diet
A specialized feeder that eats termites and ants underground, slurping them up with a unique tongue while remaining buried, an adaptation to its fossorial life.
Behavior & temperament
Representing a lineage that diverged from other frogs tens of millions of years ago, it is of exceptional evolutionary interest. Its brief, monsoon-triggered surface breeding makes it easy to overlook and hard to study, complicating conservation.
Reviewed and signed off by: KinStation Editorial — conservation profile (pending DVM/biologist review)