Friday Frog

Okay, so it's Saturday, sue me - life gets busy sometimes. To make up for it, here's an extra cool frog for you, so cool it's named after Charles Darwin!

Rhinoderma darwinii, or Darwin's frog, lives mostly in the beech-tree forests and swamps of central to southern Chile and western Argentina. What makes them particularly fascinating is that when the eggs are ready to hatch into tadpoles Daddy scoops them up in his mouth and keeps them in his vocal pouch - what the heck, he's done serenading Mommy anyway - and keeps them there for a couple more months, feeding them in there on secretions analogous to milk, until they are fully developed into froglets.

Who says guys can't be nurturing, eh? :)

Friday Frog

G'day mate! This Corroboree Frog, Pseudophryne corroboree, is a beautiful frog from the mountains of New South Wales, Australia. This one is probably from the Snowy Mountains, where the species tends to show the brightest yellow stripes; the ones from the Brindabella and Fiery ranges tend toward a lighter greenish yellow. They live in sphagnum bogs and grow to be about 25 millimeters in length.

Friday Frog

Co-QUI! Co-QUI! This little fellow isn't shy at all, shouting his name out from dusk till dawn. And why should he be? Eleutherodactylus coqui is, after all, the official animal of Puerto Rico, where this small tree-dwelling frog primarily makes his home... and yes, it's the "him" who is the homemaker here! After the female lays the fertilized eggs, the male coqui frog shoos her away and then faithfully stands guard until the eggs hatch into froglets - unlike most frogs, coquis don't go through a tadpole stage but hatch out already in pretty much their adult form. Quite a distinctive frog, eh?

Friday Frog

Today's frog is the western Chorus Frog, or Pseudacris triseriata a tiny but lovely little songster. If you want to catch a concert of these preepers I expect Garrison Keillor is bound to have them on sooner or later; they tour from March through July, in Minnesota mostly.

Friday Frog

Mmmmm tomato... no, Homer, stop! That's not a tomato, it's a Madagascan tomato frog, Dyscophus antongilli, and as with most brightly colored frogs it's not so good to eat. While not actually toxic, these guys secrete a nasty white mucus which irritates and can cause allegic reactions to people. Anyway, they're endangered, due to habitat loss in the dwindling forests of northeastern Madagascar, and also due to excessive collecting for pet stores before that became illegal. Well, they are cute... but not tasty, Homer! Have another tomacco instead.

Friday Frog

Today's frog is a very cool customer, the only frogs found north of the Arctic Circle. Wood Frog is the common name of Lithobates sylvaticus, the amphibian formerly known as Rana sylvatica. In winter, as much as 35-45% of their bodies can freeze. Ice crystals form beneath the skin and interspersed among the body's skeletal muscles. The frog's breathing, blood flow, and heart beat cease when they freeze. Special proteins prevent intracellular freezing and dehydration. Now is that cool, or what?

Friday Frog

Can you tell exactly what species this is from the picture? Well, no, not even if you're a real herpetologist, and not even if I tell you it's a Cope's Gray Tree Frog. You'd have to hear it to be sure whether it was an example of Hyla chrysoscelis or Hyla versicolor, because they're identical in appearance but have different songs. Both kinds actually come in a wide variety of colors, but always have a grayish cast and camouflage pattern.

The linked song mp3s are from the Cope's Gray Tree Frog page of Frogs and Toads Of Georgia, where you can also find a lot more pictures and information about these lovely frogs.

(Oh, and if the suspense is killing you, the one pictured is actually a Hyla chrysoscelis! ;)

Friday Frog

Anyone who uses the very nice bittorent client Azureus will recognize today's frog, the lovely and talented - ah, toxic, that is - Dendrobates azureus, the blue poison dart frog. Serenely confident in a "you don't dare eat me" kind of way, this blue diamond is a native species of the Sipaliwini Savannah of Suriname, South America (say that seven times suddenly). As the name implies, its skin secretes toxins which can paralyze or even kill predators and are eminently suitable for poison darts with which to shorten the queue at the Post Office.

Photo graciously made public domain on Wikimedia Commons by Arpingstone.

Friday Frog

Today's contender is the delightfully named Waxy Monkey Leaf Frog, Phyllomedusa sauvagii. How can you not love that? Look how cute, too, and on top of all that its secretions apparently cause an altered state of consciousness. Now that's value for money!

Picture is courtesy of PetraK via Wikimedia, under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Germany License.

Friday Frog

Ha, you thought I'd forgotten the Friday Frog, didn't you, my vast hordes of silently devoted followers? But no, I was just waiting for a friend to get around to re-sending a mangled link in a video, which I finally got but which turned out to be a cruel hoax. Never mind, here's a pretty frog for you.

The Green and Golden Bell Frog, Litora aurea, is a ground-dwelling tree frog from eastern Australia. Sadly, it's what ecologists delicately call a vulnerable species, mostly I gather due to crass industrialists and deranged golfers. (Must watch that tendency toward redundancy...) Beaut, isn't she?

Friday Frog

Yep, it's blog the frog day again. Today we have almost the opposite of the first frog I blogged - a simply enormous specimen of Lithobates catesbeianus the North American bullfrog. As you can see these guys can get pretty hefty, providing delight to small boys' hearts!

Friday Frog again already?

The thing about having a weekly feature is that it really makes it transparently obvious when you've been slacking off all week... which is my lame segue into presenting this week's transparent (or at least translucent) frog, a specially bred variant of Rana japonica the Japanese brown frog. Clever boffins led by led by professor Masayuki Sumida at Hiroshima University’s Institute for Amphibian Biology bred in a recessive to make the world a little better for frogkind, so they say, since fewer will have to be dissected given that their internal organs are reasonably visible through the skin.

Hat tip to Pink Tentacle., where further details may be found.

Friday Frog

I've always liked Pharyngula's Friday Cephalopod, so I've decided to do something similar. Much as I like squid, octopi and cuttlefish, though, I've long had a particular soft spot for frogs. (Long time fans [ha!] will remember that Dr. Alcmaeon Frog is my occasional alter ego.)

My first little frog friend is indeed a tiny one. This cute li'l fellow is Nyctibatrachus minimus, or night frog. Only a centimeter long, this frog hails from the rainforests of the Western Ghats of Kerala (sounds like a locale from Weird Tales, don't it?) and is the smallest land vertebrate in India. That's a 5 rupee coin under the frog.

The photo comes courtesy of CryptoMundo, which features all kinds of cool cryptids. A hat tip to bOINGbOING for alerting me to it!