Coquí (the frog)

The coquí is Puerto Rico’s small tree frog, named for its call, and a national symbol of the island. Frogs are carved on Taíno stones and amulets, and in a story the friar Ramón Pané recorded in the 1490s, children left without their mothers turned into frogs.

Taíno symbols. Also called coqui symbol, coqui taino, puerto rico frog symbol, taino coqui, taino frog.

Meaning

The biologists Sarah Westrick, Mara Laslo and Eva Fischer, writing in eLife in 2022, call the common coquí (Eleutherodactylus coqui, pronounced ko-kee) a national symbol of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans say “Soy de aquí como el coquí” (“I’m from here, like the coquí”), and the Taíno frog figure, they write, appears on everything from artwork and pottery to the branding of Puerto Rican companies. Frogs were carved by the Taíno themselves: Jesse Walter Fewkes, in 1907, described a three-pointed stone whose back is carved as a frog, its nose at the stone’s peak, and frog-shaped amulets of black stone in the Nazario collection at Guayanilla. The archaeologist Joanna Ostapkowicz, as the eLife authors cite her, connects the frog-like hands in Taíno imagery with femaleness, and the coquí’s calls with female fertility and children.

Origin and history

The frog story in Pané’s account, written for Columbus during his second voyage (1493–96), begins when a man named Guagugiona tells the women to leave their husbands and children and go with him to other lands. They leave the little children by a brook. When hunger takes them the children wail for their mothers, “saying ‘mama’ as if to speak, but really asking for the breast”, and are changed into little animals. Peter Martyr’s version, in its old English translation, makes them frogs crying “toa, toa, that is mamma, mamma”, and adds that this is why frogs cry so pitifully in spring.

A legend of the coquí’s name

Westrick and her co-authors give another story: that the Taíno believe a goddess made the frog to call out forever the name of her lost love, Coquí, who was taken from her by the god of chaos and disorder. It is a different story from the one Pané wrote down.

Frogs and the mother

Because frog limbs mark a figure as female, the frog is close kin to Atabey, whom many Taíno today see in the frog-legged woman carved at Caguana. Fewkes’s frog-backed stone is one of the three-pointed stones.

Sources

The big potential of the small frog Eleutherodactylus coqui (eLife, 2022), Sarah E. Westrick, Mara Laslo and Eva K. Fischer, “The Natural History of Model Organisms: The big potential of the small frog Eleutherodactylus coqui”, eLife 11 (2022), e73401, eLife, Introduction and figure 1
Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, c. 1498 (Bourne’s translation, 1906), Edward Gaylord Bourne, “Columbus, Ramon Pane and the Beginnings of American Anthropology”, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, 1906: Pané’s account translated from Ulloa’s Italian text of 1571, with Eden’s 1555 English of Peter Martyr, American Antiquarian Society (Internet Archive), Bourne’s introduction; chapters III–IV, and Peter Martyr in Eden’s English (1555)
Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands (1907), Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1903–04, Washington, 1907, Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 123 and 146

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research

Added October 9, 2026.

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