Abstract. For amphibians, the ability to "home," particularly to bodies of water, is an essential aspect of life. Homing has been well studied in salamanders (Shoop, 1965; Twitty et al., 1967; Adler, 1969). Homing in anurans has mainly focused on species that need bodies of water to either breed or rehydrate (Goin and Coleman, 1961; Dole, 1968; Carpenter and Gillingham, 1987). The ability to home is on obvious advantage for amphibians that return to water to breed, but might be less important for species with direct development such as Eleutherodactylus coqui, whose life histories are not tied to bodies of water.

Eleutherodactylus is the largest known genus of vertebrates in the world. There are approximately 432 species, with one-third of those found in the West Indies (Hedges, 1989; Joglar, 1989). Eleutherodactylus species in this archipelago tend to be endemic to the island they inhabit. There are 15 species of Eleutherodactylus on Puerto Rico (Rivero, 1978). Eleutherodactylus coqui, the coqui, is the most abundant of all the Puerto Rican species, occurring at densities of over 20,000 individuals /ha (Stewart and Pough, 1983). The coqui is found in a wider range of habitats than other membersof the genus in Puerto Rico. In the forest, its activities occur from the forest floor to the canopy.

Use of vertical habitat has been documented by Stewart (1985) and Flynn and Woolbright (in press), while horizontal components of coqui movements have been studied by Woolbright (1985). Nightly movements of adult coqui are on the average of 3.0-5.0 m (Woolbright, 1985). Little is known about the homing ability of coquies to their territories. Drewry (1970) stated that established males homed but provided no empirical data. Indeed, homing should be important to male coquies, since they exhibit all parental duties at the nest: the ability to return to the nest in order to tend the clutch is crucial to a male's reproductive success (Townsend et al., 1984). The objective of this study were to determine if individual male E. coqui can return to their calling site after being displaced well beyond their home range, and examine the effect of increased displacement distance on homing ability.