... Fauna Overview ...
by Infocostarica Staff

Anyone who has traveled in the tropics in search of wildlife can tell you that disappointment comes easy , and often at considerable expense. But Costa Rica is one place that lives up to its world. You don't need to venture far to experience the nation’s full panoply of magnificent wildlife. Costa Rica is nature’s live theater where the actors aren’t shy. Here you can find all kind of creatures like the ones that mimic other things and are hard to find : insects that look like rotting leaves, moths that look like wasps, the giant Caligo memnon (cream owl) butterfly whose huge open wings resemble the wide-eye face of an owl, and the motted, bark colored machaca (lantern fly), which is partly to blame for Costa Rica’s soaring birthrate. According to the local folklore, if a girl is stung by a machaca, she must go to bed with his boyfriend within 24 hours or die. Here you can also see those animals your not likely to see, like the pumas, the jaguars and ocelots. With patience you can spot a group of monkeys, iguanas, quetzals, and three-toed sloths, that as one guidebook puts it, get most of its aerobic exercise by scratching their bellies.

The National Institute of Biodiversity ( INBIO ), a private, nonprofit organization formed in 1989 has been charged with the work of collecting, identifying, and labeling every plant and animal species in Costa Rica. The task is expected to be done in a time of ten years. This work was done before by the National Museum which only discovered from about 10 to 20 percent of the totality of the flora and fauna species in the country in a range of 100 years.

Identifying the species is a prodigious task, which every day turns up something new. Costa Rica is home seasonally of more than 850 bird species -10% of all known in USA and Canada-. There are 5,000 different species of grasshopers,160 known amphibians, 220 reptiles, and 10% of all known butterflies. This great quantity of species is because this region served as a "filter bridge" for the intermingling of species and the evolution of modern distinctive Costa Rican biota, a fairly recent amalgam as the isthmus has been in existence for only some three million years. This together with generous infusions of plants and animals from both continents, has resulted in a proliferation of species that in many respects is vastly richer than the biota of either North or South America. But Costa Rica’s biota shares much with both.