Ingo Arndt's Image

A beam of sunlight shines down through a leaf and the translucent skin of a tiny reticulated glass frog clinging to its underside.

The male is guarding a clutch of maturing eggs, stuck to each other and to the leaf with jelly. It will guard them for two weeks until the tadpoles hatch and drop into the stream below. Males will wrestle other males in defence of their patches and in their attempts to attract females to their spawning leaves. They will also fend off predatory wasps intent on taking the eggs. The behaviour and transparency of glass frogs have always fascinated Ingo, so he travelled to Costa Rica in search of them. Transparency is the perfect camouflage, but Ingo managed to find a number of brooding males clinging to leaves beside a small stream in the Piedras Blancas National Park. Some were guarding several clutches of eggs. With the aid of a ladder, he got his shots.