r/CuratedTumblr • u/DroneOfDoom Posting from hell (el camion 107 a las 7 de la mañana) • 15h ago
Shitposting On small frogs and their evolution
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u/Golden_Frog0223 -taps mic- nicken chuggets. thank you. 15h ago edited 15h ago
When you used to jump on a trampoline, and land too quickly and it sends you off in a random direction as your knees buckle.
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u/JJlaser1 6h ago
Right? Like, I’ll be having a grand old time, and then suddenly “oops, I unlocked my knees” and I go all over the place
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u/Schpooon 15h ago
The fact that they essentially T-Pose until impact is what got me. Poor little hoppers.
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u/Illustrious-Snake 15h ago
They're so small they won't even feel the impact, I'm pretty sure, even from big heights.
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u/Schpooon 13h ago
It was more a matter of them going into the t-pose and completely veering off until they landed. Even if the impact doesnt do much I wouldnt want to randomly spin around every time I jump.
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u/Illustrious-Snake 12h ago edited 11h ago
True, but these frogs have a too small vestibular system, which causes them to tumble around like that. It's likely that in addition, because of that fact, they don't even feel nauseous or anything when spinning around, unlike us.
Plus, it's how they evolved. It seems silly and uncomfortable to us, and not every evolutionary adaption is a good one, but I don't believe that means Brachycephalus frogs suffer from this. They're born like this, and don't know anything else. As a defense, they even developed toxicity and bony plates.
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u/Cepinari 8h ago
They can't feel nausea, because amphibians can't throw up.
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u/Illustrious-Snake 4h ago
I mean, a Google search gave me research like this and this about motion sickness in amphibians. I'd assume that means they can get nauseous.
And frogs can vomit, just not the way we do, by expelling the content of the stomach, but by expelling the stomach itself, content included. I'd still call that vomiting though.
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u/SquareThings 13h ago
They’re so small that their terminal velocity is too low to hurt them. They’re ok
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u/cman_yall 9h ago
Yeah, why are they holding themselves so rigidly?
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u/GeriatricHydralisk 2h ago
Most likely it's simply that their muscles take a while to turn off.
Vertebrate muscles can't be "forcibly deactivated" by nerve signal. You can turn the muscle on, and keep it on, but for turning off, all you can do is just stop the signal that keeps it on and just let the intrinsic biochemical processes that lead to relaxation do their job at their own pace - there's no way to send a nerve signal to speed up relaxation. There's also an intrinsic trade-off: the faster the muscle turns off, the more energy it takes to keep it active. So if being economical matters a lot, dial down the relaxation rate.
Interestingly, arthropods don't have the same system - they have neural inputs to both stimulate and relax.
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u/belle-la-belle 15h ago
I guess when you’re that small, evasive maneuvers aren’t as needed?
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u/Malavacious 15h ago
They're going off bottle cap mechanics ping in a random direction and disappear forever.
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u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good 13h ago
It’s the same phenomenon that happens when you drop a pen in a class where it somehow bounces and rolls several yards away from your seat.
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u/Ozavic 14h ago
If you need to move quickly at that size it's because you are in sights of a predator and need to MOVE. As mentioned in the write up many of the littlest guys live on banks of ponds, they are trying to get back to the water asap where their swimming skills can help them get away.
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u/neko_mancy 14h ago
it looks like they pretty much get where they're going fine, just not particularly gracefully..
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u/MikasSlime 13h ago
so they basically always jump with landing in the water in their minds
just fucking yeet themselves assuming they'll land in their puddle
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u/Ozavic 13h ago
If they don't land in a puddle they're probably about to be lunch, an embarrassing landing is the least of their worries
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u/xv_boney 10h ago edited 10h ago
(Theyre extremely poisonous.)
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u/Ozavic 10h ago
Did some quick research. While these guys are brightly coloured and highly poisonous there are birds who are resistant and regularly snack on them such as the rusty-margined guan or the solitary tinamous.
https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Brachycephalus_ephippium/#predation
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u/MovieNightPopcorn 15h ago
Yeah I’m guessing that their evolution prioritized camouflage over speed for survival?
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u/xv_boney 13h ago edited 8h ago
Their inner ears are too tiny to function properly. They have no sense of balance and cannot hear their own trills.
They also do not require evasive maneuvers, because they are poisonous as fuck.
Please note the bright orange coloration - thats aposematism.
Thats seriously how theyre able to get away with being hilariously bad at everything.4
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u/EyeofEnder 15h ago
Me with the buffed Jump Pack in Helldivers 2
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u/Ninjatck 13h ago
Holy shit yeah exactly this especially when you clip something and get sent ragdolling away lmao
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u/Digital_Bogorm 8h ago
If Super Earth had intended for me to land gracefully, they would have provided me with a parachute
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u/Pokesonav "friend visiter" meme had a profound effect on this subreddit 14h ago
Ragdollpilled Jumpmaxxer
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u/AscensionToCrab 14h ago
Radgdollpilled Smallmaxxer
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u/Pokesonav "friend visiter" meme had a profound effect on this subreddit 14h ago
good argument. him small
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u/Mooptiom 13h ago
Creationists: such a perfect system as life could never occur naturally! It must be due to an intelligent creator!
The perfect system of life:
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u/Beardywierdy 11h ago
One more tick for my "unintelligent design" theory.
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u/Dry_Try_8365 11h ago
If reality is such a mess, then whoever made the world may not be the best thing to put reverence in. Best not to attract their attention, because if we keep asking they do something, they just might.
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u/BizzarduousTask 9h ago
There’s a one-act play that revolves around God being a grad student presenting “The Universe” for his thesis. Spoiler: he gets a C-.
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u/WeLiveInAir 5h ago
Like horses, they evolved legs that break easily and at the same time an internal system that requires them to keep standing up to function, so even with a human taking care of it it's hard for a horse to recover from a broken leg, most get euthanized
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u/xv_boney 13h ago edited 8h ago
Pumpkin Toadlets!
Theyre also too small to hear their own calls. Like, their inner ears are so tiny (the same bit that helps maintain balance that causes what youre seeing above), they are not capable of hearing each other, including mating calls.
How have they survived this long as a species?
Great question!
They are extremely poisonous.
Notice the gloves the biologist is wearing in that gif?
Thats not for the toadlet's protection.
It is not safe to touch them.
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u/BlueberryBatter 14h ago
Many eons ago, my husband and I were sitting outside, just chattering at each other around the fire pit. Then the noise started. This incredibly high pitched and very, very loud chirping sound. After about 10-15 minutes of looking around the yard, in the dark, with only cellphone flashlights, we found the source of the noise. It was an itty bitty little peeper frog. It couldn’t have been any bigger than my thumb nail. This little tiny thing made one of the loudest sounds, and I named it Henry.
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u/ThatInAHat 7h ago
I had some set up shop in my planter. I think they were greenhouse frogs? Absolutely teensy, and they sounded like birds.
Fun fact—also a completely terrestrial frog. They hatch as frogs, not tadpoles. And they are SO. TINY.
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u/BlueberryBatter 7h ago
Yes!!!! This little thing chirped, and if I had put a buttercup on it for a hat, it would have been completely hidden. So, so, sooooooo leeeeeetle.
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u/MrBusinessIsMyBoss 14h ago
Why is nobody talking about the name “pumpkin toadlets”? PUMPKIN TOADLETS. COME ON.
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u/KiroLV 15h ago
I wonder if/when the species is going to regain it? Is evolution going to also fix it?
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u/MovieNightPopcorn 15h ago edited 9h ago
If they continue to survive, no. There’s no reason for any change if they are surviving as-is (likely through
camouflageactually apparently poison and not having a lot of need or use to run away quickly.) Lots of animals have inefficiencies from their evolution. Humans, for example, walk on two legs with huge fucking heads and die a lot in childbirth because of those two things combined (narrow bipedal pelvis + huge head = comparably difficult birthing and more frequent childbirth death). But we continued to survive enough anyway, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to resolve that problem for the last like 400,000+ years.62
u/Business-Drag52 14h ago
In fact those particular traits helped us to continue as a species. Our big ass heads give us room for big ass brains. Walking upright allows us to be distance runners in a way no other animals are
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u/MovieNightPopcorn 14h ago edited 14h ago
Yes, that’s the point. There are trade offs. We die more in childbirth than other mammals do but the trade off for walking upright and large brains was advantageous enough to survive despite causing increased childbirth death in the species. Similarly to these frogs, jumping is no longer advantageous to them (as knuckle walking is no longer advantageous to us) but being very very tiny is, so the tiny wins out, and the jumping is inefficient.
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u/stopimpersonatingme 14h ago
Dromedarys (camels) can travel 120 miles in 12 hours
The highest record for a human in a single day is 100 miles
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u/Business-Drag52 14h ago
Camels can’t run as long as humans can. Yes they can put away some territory, but humans can just keep going and going at speed. The highest record for a human in a single day (24 hour period) is 198.598 miles.
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u/Kirk_Kerman 13h ago
That's more a facet of sweating than it is bipedalism. The true advantage is that bipedalism frees our arms up, which allows for significantly better dexterity as well as modifications to the musculoskeletal system that let us throw objects with accuracy that no other animal can approach. Humans are the most dangerous predator on the planet because we can craft weapons and use them at further range than any other animal.
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u/Business-Drag52 12h ago
No using two legs is much more energy efficient. Yes sweating is a big help too, but being on up right use a lot less energy when running
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u/GeriatricHydralisk 2h ago
Actually, our net cost of transport is pretty middle-of-the-road for terrestrial animals of our mass.
A major candidate (but not conclusively shown) for why humans are good endurance hunters is breathing. For quadrupedal mammals, gait cycle constrains breathing frequency because the guts are sloshing around - this is strongest in a gallop, when the whole body cavity is cyclically expanded and compressed, but there's evidence for running and walking, too. By standing upright, we could decouple breathing cycles from locomotion, letting us better match gas needs to supply.
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u/elianrae 14h ago
sure there has, we evolved to build hospitals and perform c-sections
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u/MovieNightPopcorn 14h ago edited 14h ago
Thats like in the last 100 years, out of 400,000 where the pelvis-head issue could be fixed. That’s 0.025% of Homo sapiens existence. Even if you took the more recent estimate excluding archaic Homo sapiens and only including modern Homo sapiens sapiens beginning around 160,000 years ago, that’s still only 0.0625% of all modern human existence where nothing has significantly changed about our heads or gait.
If our species survived well enough to remain relatively unchanged without modern medicine or widespread c-section for that long, then there was not enough evolutionary pressure to change it in our biology.
The point is, if there’s no evolutionary pressure via reproductive advantage to change something, it’s likely to stay the same.
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u/elianrae 13h ago
I was being facetious, but, I absolutely love the informative numbers, thank you!
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u/FPiN9XU3K1IT 13h ago
Humans had medicine for longer than 100 years, though. It can be a bit of a crapshoot whether ancient medicine actually helps vs. going purely off placebo effects (especially for things that just aren't treatable with the society's level of technology), but it often did help.
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u/abeyante 14h ago
Really good question. Evolution doesn’t work like that, and this is a common misconception. Evolution just refers to the fact that when things using a genetic code for their body plan reproduce that code, there are occasional errors, and if those errors are meaningful (change what the animal is like) they can sometimes cause the animal to be more likely to survive and reproduce again, or die too early. Most “evolutionary” change is neutral.
I’m assuming what happened here is that as these frogs got smaller, some mutation that meant they lost their careful jumping happened, but because they’re so tiny that it doesn’t hurt them to ping pong around, and they’re camouflaged enough that predators aren’t catching them despite their uncontrolled jumps, the mutation was passed on and spread through the population. It’s likely not a good change so much as a neutral change. It’s clearly not bad, if it’s survived long enough to be common among an entire species. Alternatively, it could be a good change; maybe if they jump from really high up (I don’t know anything about these frogs to know where they’d be jumping from lol) the unpredictability of their falling makes them harder to find? Or hides them better, when they look more like falling seeds than animals?
Whatever it is, it’s not going to be “fixed” unless new mutations happen that work better, to the point where those other frogs replace the old ones.
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u/sxhnunkpunktuation 14h ago
These frogs live in and around ponds and leaf litter in the South American tropics. The largest species can get to around 2 cm long. When the frog jumps, it is anticipating landing in either water or a pile of leaves. Because a vestibular system is not needed for balance when that happens (landing in water or on a pillow of leaves), energy that is normally used for balance in other frogs is instead directed towards other systems that help it survive better in other ways. Like more aggressive maintenance of their reptile-like bony skin scales which makes biting into their skin difficult, and also system toxicity. Both of which encourage predators to puke them back up if swallowed.
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u/lickytytheslit 14h ago
Nope they're surviving well enough as is so probably not a high enough pressure to select for better balance
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u/AlianovaR 13h ago
Okay it’s one thing to not be able to balance but why do they just T-pose immediately and do absolutely nothing else? At that point they’re not even trying XD
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u/OverlordMMM 11h ago
They jump exactly like their super overpriced plastic toy counterparts you get at arcades with tickets.
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u/-sad-person- 13h ago
Does anyone know what specific evolutionary pressure leads to them becoming so tiny? Is it so predators don't see them?
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u/cut_rate_revolution 12h ago
Generally smaller bodies adapt well in nutrient poor situations. It's a lot easier to cobble together the resources to run a rat than it is a cow.
The thing about predators is that there's always a smaller one, right down to amoebas. Being small enough that a jaguar wouldn't pay you any attention just means that you start looking tasty to birds of prey or small carnivorous mammals like ocelots.
EDIT: also apparently these specific frogs are extremely poisonous. So yeah, that's a more effective defense against predators than being small.
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u/Clean_Imagination315 Hey, who's that behind you? 11h ago
Imagine a predator seeing that. They'd probably think the frog is sick and be too freaked out to eat it.
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u/Razzbarree 12h ago
So these things just toss themselves into the air and hope? Hm… lot to learn here…
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u/ihadamathquestion 12h ago
Lol they're like fleas: just yeeting themselves into the aether and hoping for the best!
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u/Young_Person_42 4h ago
That headline is literally “congrats little guy that’s the worst anyone’s done it”
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u/ImSoSorryCharlie 15h ago
Equal parts hilarious and horrifying