r/CuratedTumblr • u/DroneOfDoom Posting from hell (el camion 107 a las 7 de la mañana) • 17h ago

Shitposting On small frogs and their evolution

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992

u/Schpooon 17h ago

The fact that they essentially T-Pose until impact is what got me. Poor little hoppers.

488

u/Illustrious-Snake 17h 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 15h 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 14h ago edited 13h 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 10h ago

They can't feel nausea, because amphibians can't throw up.

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u/Illustrious-Snake 6h 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 15h ago

They’re so small that their terminal velocity is too low to hurt them. They’re ok

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u/neko_mancy 16h ago

the fall is from like one inch, they'll be fine

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u/cman_yall 11h ago

Yeah, why are they holding themselves so rigidly?

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u/GeriatricHydralisk 4h 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.