South American poison frogs are known to most people for their poison — and their brilliant colors. But in almost all species, the poison frog carries tadpoles on its back to a rain forest pool for their final growth stage.

One species, Allobates femoralis, may or may not be mildly poisonous, and for color it has a splash of orange on its thighs. Thus its endearing common name, the brilliant-thighed poison frog. And sure enough, the females lay the eggs in a relatively dry spot in the rain forest, and once the embryos reach tadpole stage, the males load them on their backs and take off.

Andrius Pasukonis, a researcher associated with the University of Vienna and Harvard University, has been studying these frogs in the rain forest of French Guiana to learn how the males find the pools and what triggers this complicated act of tadpole transport. He and Kristina Beck, a graduate student at the University of Vienna, and others, determined in one project that the frogs don’t search for pools but return directly to pools they know.

“They really rely on their spatial memory; they don’t randomly wander around the forest until they bump into pools,” Dr. Pasukonis said. The publication of that research was the first time the navigational behavior of the frogs was described, he said.