In 1841, French zoologist André Marie Constant Duméril and his assistant Gabriel Bibron described and named Darwin's frog.

Darwin's frog has an unusual method of brooding, in which the male will facilitate development of its tadpoles inside its vocal sac.

[5] The throat is brownish and the remaining underparts are black with large white blotches in a pattern that is unique to each individual.

It is found in glades and forested areas at altitudes of up to about 1,100 m (3,600 ft) above mean sea level, in bogs and near slow-moving streams, and in a variety of vegetation types.

It appears that a mixture of grassland, mossy areas, coarse woody debris, and young trees and bushes in a mature native forest provides its optimum habitat requirements.

Short vegetation increases the retention of water while decreasing the temperature of the soil and providing concealment from predators.

The Valdivian (their typical habitat) is decreasing in the north due to pine and eucalyptus agriculture expansion.

Using climate change models, wildfires are expected to increase at a dramatic rate which will negatively affect the R. darwinii habitat.

[8] Darwin's frog has undergone significant population declines due to habitat loss and degradation, largely from conversion of native forests to tree plantations.

The recent change in its conservation category in IUCN from Vulnerable to Endangered, arose from the Chile's amphibian reevaluation workshop for the Red List (Soto-Azat et al., 2015).

The justification for its current category is due to its limited occupation area (estimated at 264 km2), severe fragmentation of its populations and continued decline.

In 2017, the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group formed a Binational Conservation Strategy that brought together 30 different countries.

The group details the unique characteristics (mouth brooding) as one justification for this increased conservation effort.

Darwin’s frog has been shown to have distinct mating patterns based on population and body size.

The male, after about 3 to 4 weeks, notices the developing embryos beginning to move, and then he ingests the eggs and holds them in his vocal sac.

This observation is consistent across studies and there exist some proposed explanations for the alloparental behavior, which is especially rare among amphibians.

This observation is likely explained by these hypotheses: R. darwinii exhibit rare behavior in terms of territoriality and parental care.

These observations of R. darwinii were used to further develop the relationship between territoriality and parental care by establishing the role of oviposition defense.

These observations suggest that anurans will exhibit territoriality with parental care if they defend oviposition sites.

[15] The amphibian disease chytridiomycosis, caused by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungal infection, is also a probable factor.

Previous studies have supported the idea that chytridiomycosis could be somewhat responsible for the decrease in R. darwinii populations observed in Chile and Argentina.

Previous research supported the hypothesis that larger body sizes were tied to higher seasonality because of an idea termed starvation resistance.

Starvation resistance is the idea that the larger the size of an ectotherm, the less likely it is to “starve,” as it can use its body’s mass for fuel.

This allows for researchers to study the same species in different climates, an important aspect in order to make claims about the relationship between body size and seasonality/climate.