Stories tagged frogs
How do we know that this isn't the Southern Sandhill Frog?: Because it has burrowed backwards, of course! A handsome toad, nonetheless.
Courtesy phyzomeThere’s big amphibian news this week. A brand new model of toad-looking frog was unveiled to the world on Friday: the Southern Sandhill Frog, of Australia’s Kalbarri sandhills.
Be sure not to confuse the Southern Sandhill Frog with the Northern Sandhill Frog, of Australia’s Kalbarri sandhills—the two have been distinct species for more than five million years, and the southern species is easily distinguished by its more “squashed in, munted face.”
Intensive linguistic research is ongoing as to just what the Aussies mean by “munted.”
A fun fact! Sandhill frogs burrow headfirst, as opposed to most Australian burrowing frogs, which burrow backwards! Talk about weird!
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Sing me a song oh pianofrog: Researchers are finding the a species of frogs in China sing mating songs as duets at ultrasonic frequencies.
Courtesy carfKeep your American Idol. I’ll settle to listening to Frog Idol.
Researchers in China have found that frogs in the wild there communicate with each other in a duet of musical tones made at ultrasonic frequencies that are beyond the hearing range of humans.
Specifically, they’ve recorded the mating calls between females and males. How’s this for setting the mood, the researchers found the romantic duets could most often be heard on rainy nights.
After recording the female portion of the duet, the researchers played back that recording to males kept in captivity. They responded by adding the male response – sort of a frog version of a duet between Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. The males also began leaping toward the source of the female songs.
Why is this so cool to know, besides prying into the romantic ways of Chinese frogs? It’s further proof that some animals have been able to adapt their hearing range to live successfully in their environment.
Being able to communicate at ultrasonic levels gives frogs a way to hear each other of the lower frequency noise caused by rushing river waters in their habit.
And just like human singers, the female frogs sing their portion of the duet at a higher frequency than the male frogs.
But the real lessons from these frogs may be applied in improving hearing aid technology. That’s the main purpose behind these researchers’ work.
Now if Budweiser could get its frogs to sing at ultrasonic frequencies, maybe it could sell even more beer!
Frog of the year: Leap Day 2008 is also the start of the Year of the Frog, a global awareness effort to increase understanding of the threats frogs and other amphibians are facing around the globe.
Courtesy wikipediaLeap Day (today, Feb. 29) usually gets its scientific props in regard to astronomy, phenology or maybe rare birthday-ology.
But those concerned with care for our amphibious friends are using today as the jumping off point to raise more awareness of the dangers frogs and their related species are facing today.
So Feb. 29, 2008, is also the start of the Year of the Frog. Here’s what’s happened in the past 28 years: 120 varieties of amphibians have gone extinct on our planet. Breaking that down into a yearly average, that’s about four species per year.
Even more sobering news, about half of the remaining 6,000 species croaking and sliming about are on endangered lists.
But here’s the big idea for the Year of the Frog. Researchers are hoping to develop an Amphibian Ark, a place similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that opened this week in Norway, where zoo organizations would maintain populations of amphibians in a controlled environment that could eventually be released into the wild when appropriate environments get more stable.
Now isn’t that an idea we should all get jumping on?
Well... He's pretty funny and pathetic...: But don't you think he'd be a little funnier and sadder if we could see through him? (Photo by jepoirrer on flickr.com)Japanese scientists have struck the final, hilarious, and kind of yucky blow in the age-old fight to put frogs “back in their place.”
“Everyone already knows that dressing frogs up in clothing is pretty funny,” stated lead researcher Masayuki Sumida, professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University, “But a while back we started to wonder, ‘what if we went just the opposite way?’ What if we could create a completely naked frog?
“That would really show them who’s the boss,” added Sumida.
The IAB team would soon find, however, that creating a “naked” frog is much more difficult than one might assume. As it happens, merely removing the clothing that one has already put on a frog does not result in a naked frog. Instead what you end up with is simply a “frog.”
Taking the next logical step, the team attempted anesthetizing a frog, and removing its skin. This, they hoped, would overcome the amphibian’s natural defenses against nakedness. This experiment produced a suitably naked, but unfortunately “dead” frog, and, as the point of the experiment was to humiliate the creature, Sumida felt that the team must take a new direction.
For some time very little progress was made, and the team feared that the project’s funding would soon fall through, for lack of results. One night, however, a plucky young member of the research team remembered that the Japanese brown frog, or rena japonica carried two separate chromosomal slots, which, if occupied by specific recessive genes, could cause the normally dark colored frog to be born pale. Acting on a hunch, the researcher bred groups of frogs carrying the recessive genes. When a frog was finally produced that carried both sets of recessive genes, the team had their break through. This frog’s skin was so pale that it could actually be seen through (check out the picture). What’s more, the tadpoles with these genes bore similarly transparent skin, and one could “see dramatic changes of organs when tadpoles mutate into frogs.”
Sumida’s team hopes to patent this process for making see-through frogs, claiming that the creatures would make unique and invaluable study aids, or, at the very least, good conversation pieces.
The offspring of the transparent frogs share their parents’ traits. However, as an unexpected bonus insult to the frogs, by the next generation genetics seems to catch up, and the grandchildren die shortly after birth.
So where does research go from here? “It might seem like there’s not a lot more we could do to these little guys,” says a team spokesperson. “But we like to think that as long as there are frogs still around, we’re going to try and do something weird to them. Our next project? I don’t want to get too into it, but I’ll say this: glow-in-the-dark.”
Remember those freaky frogs first discovered by Minnesota schoolchildren in 1995? (Science Buzz did an exhibit about them, too, in early spring of 2005.) Pieter Johnson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder (formerly of University of Wisconsin, Madison), has published his newest research: he says parasites called trematodes cause the missing and extra legs, and that runoff from farms and lawns fuels algae growth, which allows for larger snail populations, which means more trematodes and more deformed frogs....
Pine Barrens Tree Frog: In this image the tympanum can be seen as the small round disk to the right of the eye. Image courtesy Bruce Means and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.Do frogs have ears?
Yes, they do, but they are different from the ears we have. Frogs do not have external ears, rather they have something called a tympanum. The tympanum are behind the eyes, and look like round disks. Some tympanum are easier to see than others. They receive sound waves for the frog just like the tympanic membrane (also known as the eardrum) does for us. Frogs not only use the tympanum to hear, but also use their lungs. The lungs help with hearing, and also protect the frog’s eardrums from the very loud noises frogs make by equalizing pressures between the inner and outer surfaces of the tympanum.
What does sublimation mean?
In physics, sublimation is the process by which a solid converts to a gas and bypasses a liquid stage in doing so. Have you ever seen dry ice? At room temperature, dry ice sublimates directly into a gas, skipping the liquid stage.
Where do Komodo Dragons live?
There are about 6,000 Komodo Dragons living in the wild. They live on the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia.
What causes hiccups?
There are a variety of causes for hiccups, including eating too quickly, swallowing too much air, taking a cold drink while eating a hot meal, laughing, coughing, or drinking too much alcohol.
Hiccups are an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm, the large muscle that separates the chest cavity from the abdominal cavity. The sudden intake of air into the lungs is stopped by the glottis, which causes the “hic” sound.
Do you know how fast the Earth spins on its axis?
Well, if you figure the Earth does one full rotation on its axis about every 24 hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, and 04.09 seconds), and the Earth’s circumference is around 25,000 miles (24,901.55 miles), then it spins at roughly 1,040 miles per hour.
Illustration of the life-cycle of the Sun: Illustration courtesy Tablizer.
Courtesy TablizerWill the sun explode?
No, but one day it will be large enough to push the Earth into a new orbit while eradicating the Earth’s atmosphere – but not for a long, long time. Our sun does not have enough mass to “go supernova” and explode. But, in about 5-6 billion years it will start becoming a red giant once it has used up its supply of hydrogen in its core and switched to fusing hydrogen in a shell outside of its core. While this is happening other processes will cause the sun to grow. Much, much later, the red dwarf will become a planetary nebula, and then a white dwarf. This is the standard stellar evolution for a star such as our sun.
More soft tissue recovered from fossils
in Life Science, Cells, History and Nature of Science, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Maria McNamara of University College Dublin, and colleagues in the UK, Spain, and US, have recovered bone marrow from 10-million-year-old fossilized bones of frogs and salamanders found in Spain.
The marrow was preserved in 3D, and still has its original texture and color. Scientists think they may be able to extract traces of protein and DNA.
Even more interestingly, the fossils prove that ancient salamanders produced blood cells in their bone marrow. Modern salamanders, on the other hand, produce blood cells in their spleens.
Last year, US scientists recovered some tissue resembling blood vessels from a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. They also found traces of what appeared to be red blood cells. (More on the T. rex find.)
And now that they're looking, scientists think they may find examples of preserved bone marrow in many fossils, raising the possibility of analyzing the proteins and DNA of lots of long-extinct organisms.
It's a pretty amazing world we live in. Dozens of new species are discovered within days of more nearing extinction. I've heard it many times, and it seems almost corny to repeat it, but it has to be true that species have become extinct due habitat destruction, invasive species and who knows what else that we didn't even know existed.
Female mountain yellow-legged frog: Image courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
An example of one "what else" is the story of what's happening to the mountain yellow-legged frog. This little fellow would seem to be quite the survivor, living up to nine months under snow and ice in the Sierra Nevada range. The populations of these frogs were at one time so great that they were practically a tripping hazard. However this frog is headed towards extinction, fast.
But interestingly, it's not entirely our fault. Introducing trout to the lakes that the frogs had called home for sport fishing and forcing them into smaller more isolated lakes has not helped matters, nor has agricultural pollutants transported to the area by prevailing winds, but it turns out the biggest culprit is a fungus.
The chytrid fungus has caused frog extinctions in other countries, and grows on the skin of the frog, making it hard for them to properly use their pores to control their water intake — they die of thirst while they are living in water. And it is not just the mountain yellow-legged frog that is dying from this fungus, the boreal toad population in Rocky Mountain National Park is also being decimated by this fungus.
And because it is a fungus, not people that are pushing the frogs to extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is struggling to declare the frog an endangered species. Since the fungus is natural and not the by-product of agricultural waste or pollution, it is hard to secure funding to save a frog afflicted with it. Why save a frog that is dying through no fault of ours?
What do you think? Should funding be set aside to save species from extinction if they are becoming extinct through natural causes? Or should we focus our resources on trying to save species that are facing extinction as a direct result of our actions?
In August 1995, schoolchildren found deformed frogs in a wetland near Henderson, Minnesota. Some frogs had extra legs, others no legs at all. Some had missing or extra eyes, toes, or feet. And some also had problems with their internal organs. By the fall of 1996, there were over 200 reports of freakish frogs, from two-thirds of Minnesota's counties. Deformed frogs have since been found in 44 states.
Deformed frog: This frog has two right back legs. Others have been found with missing legs, missing parts of legs, or legs in unexpected places.
Courtesy Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
A 1997 study raised frogs in the lab, mixing pure water with water from two Minnesota sites that had lots of deformed frogs. The more pond water that was used, the more likely the lab frogs were to be deformed. Water from sites with healthy frogs produced healthy animals in the lab. The scientific conclusion was, "There's something in the water." But what could it be? Since then, several researchers have been hunting for the cause.
Scientists have proposed several explanations for the deformities. It may be parasites, chemicals, ultraviolet light, or some combination of the three. Lab studies have shown that all of these factors, alone or in combination, can cause some deformities. But no single cause seems to explain it all. The research doesn't yet add up to a neat and tidy answer, so scientists continue to puzzle out the story.
Who cares about frogs? You should. If there's something wrong with the water, it may eventually hurt all of us. But it will hurt frogs first. Frogs have thin skins, and easily absorb any contaminants in the water. Frogs seem to be in trouble all around the world. There are more and more reports of deformities. And some species have disappeared, or no longer live in their old habitats. It's a wide-spread problem that may affect us all.
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