Apr 10 2009
Exploding Wood Frogs
I almost missed the wood frogs breeding this year, it seemed like they were only calling for a single day and night. If you’ve never experienced “Woodstock”, as it should be called, it goes a little like this.
The boys show up at the pond first, and start making a whole lotta noise. Then come the females, looking for somewhere to get rid of all the heavy eggs they’re carrying around. In the pond the males are running around groping everyone they run into, until they run into a female. Once they find her they hang on and attempt to keep their happy parts in the right place for when the eggs come out. In order to do this they have to fight off all the other males that are trying to grab their female. Imagine a pile of naked football players, but instead of a ball there is a girl in the middle.
The evidence of a party is apparent the morning after. The pond is full of globs of eggs attached to every available branch, and the only wood frogs to be seen are the ones that didn’t make it out alive.
This female had been dead a while before the picture was taken, but it appears her eggs did get fertilized even if they didn’t come out the way they were supposed to. In comparison to the other egg clusters in the pond these seem a little less developed. I’m not really sure how to interpret that. Eggs don’t last long if they are not fertilized, so there must have been sperm present when the eggs were exposed. Was this female late to the party when there were less females to go around? Or did the males just keep going until there were eggs present, long after the other eggs were laid, unaware of her death? We could probably compare the state of frog decomposition to the stage of development of the eggs to see if there is a discrepancy. CSI Wildlife- Theories anyone?…..
