They are bright. They are poisonous, They are the frogs of Bocas Del Toro, Panama. When Charles Darwin noticed the diversions of features among closely-related species on neighboring islands, he arrived to a profound idea - the principle of natural selection.

Darwin focused on the beaks of finches but the Poison Dart frogs of Bocas Del Toro are another great example of such polymorphism. The many islands are only a mile apart, but each has a frog of its own color. And they are beautiful. We go to Isla Bastimentos to look for them, and find them.

I am deeply in love with nature and the manifestations of its creativity. No one would argue nature’s impact on art. But few realize how powerful its influence is in my own field of mathematics. In fact, the ants were responsible for my choices in life, with their uncanny ability to optimize travel routes. The ants are amazing at efficiency, and the understanding of how they operate, led to the modern optimization algorithms. Not of the social media variety, but of the type that allow your phones to work.

The realization that individually simple, but socially complex ants could perform the nearly intractable computations for millions of years ahead of us made me interested in understanding how to crack their code.

I digress. Or maybe, I am making a point that nature is the rock which informs my thinking, and my relationship with the world. So, when an opportunity to explore a new magic of nature arrives, Alex and I usually take it. And when it does not, we turn off the noise of modernity and go looking for it.

While my mind is entirely consumed by my book project until the end of August, I am happy to find respite in telling stories of what excites us through video.

We chat about a few facts, and watch the frogs hop around. They are very difficult to stop watching.

The following is an auto-generated summary of the show:

We took a trip to Isla Bastimentos in search of the famous red poison dart frogs, one of the many colorful frog varieties found throughout the Bocas del Toro archipelago. Each island has its own unique frog coloration due to geographic isolation—on Bastimentos, they’re bright red; on Isla Colón, typically green; and on the mainland, some are black with green spots.

As we hiked through the jungle, we were excited but cautious, especially with our dog in tow—we worried he might try to lick or eat one of the frogs, which could be dangerous. Fortunately, he seemed to instinctively avoid them, maybe put off by their striking red color.

When we finally spotted the frogs, we were amazed. They were even smaller than we expected—about the size of a thumb—but incredibly vibrant, glowing red with tiny black spots. Though they’re known for their toxicity, we learned that these frogs don’t start out very poisonous; they build up their chemical defenses over time through their diet, and the mothers feed them unfertilized eggs to boost their toxicity as they grow. Watching the frogs sit still and puff their tiny throats in and out as we approached was a surreal and unforgettable moment.

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