Creature Feature: Pac-Man Frogs.

Frogs are usually pretty positive creatures. Kermit's awesome, and even Mr. Toad from Wind in the Willows was a fun character. Name one evil frog. The poisonous ones from South America do not count.

Albino shown. It just LOOKED more like Pac-Man.

 

The Argentine Horned Frog (Ceratophrys ornata) is not particularly poisonous, but still sinister. It is called a Pacman frog for a reason. The big mouth, the round body, the yellow coloration as an albino...why is it not devouring jellyfish, again?

Pacman frogs are, for frogs, voracious. They can be fed on any number of store-bought insects and fish, which is more or less what one would expect a frog to eat. After mating, however, the mates will sometimes attempt to eat each other, making Mrs. Pac-Man a whole lot more disturbing. Large females can even swallow rats. These things are so hungry that they will even try to eat things bigger than their heads, resulting in death by gluttony.



Argentine Horned Frogs are readily available in the exotic pet industry. They can be kept in a ten-gallon aquarium all their lives. For the frogs' own safety, do not house multiple specimens in the same tank. We have no word on what happens to jellyfish if one of these guys eats a larger-than-normal pellet.

Creature Feature: Surinam Toad.

Raise your hand if you know what "lotus boob" is. Keep it up if that simple, Photoshopped image of a lotus seed pod over a lady's teats gives you shivers. If you do not know what the hell I am talking about, there was a lotus pod + boob image combined with a gross story about how parasites laid eggs in a woman's rack a while back. It was quickly found to be fake, but still scarring.

Silly internet. Nature has something much creepier than that.



That's not from a horror flick. It's from an exotic pet convention. People raise Surinam toads (Pipa pipa) at least in part for the strange-as-all-get-out way that the females give birth. Seriously, those guys up there are acting like it's Christmas. They aren't freaked at all; after all, mammalian birth is at least as gross.

Surinam toads are native to South America (hence the name). Even without eggs in their backs, they look strange. They are to frogs and toads what the matamata is to other turtles.

The main reason people are interested in Surinam toads is their weird reproductive habits. While making out (called "amplexus" for frogs), the male and female rise from the floor and begin to loop around while locked. As they turn, the female releases eggs; because of how they loop, the eggs wind up on her back, like this:



Now, hold your Przelawski horses: Don't frogs usually hatch into tadpoles? The ones in the video emerged as...well, not fully-grown frogs, but frogs far more froglike than tadpoles. Those eggs are not just on the mother's back; they're embedded into her skin. So, too, are her babies for most of their lives. When they are fully-developed, they swim through their mother's hollowed skin and are independent from then on.

Hey, be glad that Nintendo did not go all-out with this one. The giant frog from Gen V (dub name not yet confirmed) is covered with giant blue eg- I mean boom box speakers. Well, that's one way to remove how insane this amphibian is; besides having eggs in its back, the male uses clicks to call his mate underwater. The eggs are still freakier.

Tomorrow: What is a Przelawski's horse, anyway?

Creature Feature: Flying Frogs.

Speaking of things that should not fly but do...



Flying frogs (family Rhacophoridae) glide (again, not fly) using the webbing in between their REALLY long toes.They live in the more tropical regions of Asia, including China, Laos and Vietnam. (Why is everything I like from Asia? I swear, I didn't know that was where flying frogs came from!)  The earliest reports of flying frogs came from Alfred Russell Wallace, who got the largest species (Rhacophorus nigropalmatus) named in his honor.



Wallace's flying frog exhibits several traits that make it aerodynamic: its limbs are a LOT longer than those of the average frog; its body is narrow; finally, get a load of those winglike feet!

Wallace's flying frog is not only the largest flying frog, but the most photogenic; the markings on its webbed toes look almost like something off of a dart frog's body. Before you all bitch that there is probably an adaptive drawback that keeps the frog from moving, each of its long toes is also tipped with a suction cup. It can climb just fine and escape from tree snakes via the awesome gliding flaps.

(They also have cool eyes.)


As the video said, there are also extreme kamikaze frogs that jump for their lives when faced with a tree snake. These can be found all over the world; Old World flying frogs like Wallace's are different from the New World treefrogs in that they DO have those amazingly huge flaps for gliding. The ones in the New World are more like the second frog shown in that video.



Don't worry! You'll get there, someday! Keep flying, froggies! :D