Lanka Talents

It looked like an ordinary piece of luggage filled with clothes. Then police inspectors at Bogóta’s El Dorado International Airport noticed something strange at the bottom of the bag – security X-rays revealed a curious dark cluster amid the clothes.

The mysterious clump turned out to be hundreds of black photographic film canisters. But when officials opened the canisters, they were found not to contain any film.

Packed inside were 424 critically-endangered frogs, each with a black market value of up to $2,000 (£1,479). Some had electric yellow and black stripes, others were milky green with splodges of neon orange, a few lay lifeless; all were highly poisonous.

According to police, the species had been poached from the Chocó and Valle del Cauca regions of the Colombian Pacific and were on their way to Germany.

But this incident on 13 April 2019 was merely part of an ongoing problem with wildlife smuggling in Colombia, which has around 850 species of amphibians and the world’s second highest diversity of frogs.