6 ms·
A frog so small, it could not frog
- cultofmetatron 4y ago[flagged]
- schroeding 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220625115247/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/06/pumpkin-toadlet-frogs-uncontrolled-landing-jumps/661262/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115247/https://www.theat...
- jhgb 4y agohttps://archive.ph/6niS9 https://archive.ph/6niS9
- schroeding 4y agoAmazing. This is now my second-favourite frog, with the number one still being the squeaky Desert Rain Frog[1] :D [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBxn56l9WcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBxn56l9WcU
- Timon3 4y agoThe synopsis for this is: a type of frog is very small, and their vestibular systems are too small to work properly - so jumping results in an "uncontrolled landing". And the videos[1] are about as funny as you can imagine! [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplementary-materials https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplemen... -> Other supplementary materials -> Movies S1 to S6; S1 is a reference frog, S2-6 are the mentioned frog
- darkerside 4y agoAmazing. I need these set to actual commentary on the Olympic ski jump.
- alehlopeh 4y agoThe article is a fun read; it’s informative and has a humorous bent, and it avoids coming across as pretentious or lacking detail. The site’s “paywall” is just a banner over the full content of the article, making it amenable to Reader mode. It’s like a 2 minute read. Just read it.
- Timon3 4y agoI mostly just wanted to show people the cool frog videos :) of course people should read the article, but now those who don't also got to enjoy them.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoKatherine J. Wu did not hold back in roasting the poor frog, Yet did complete justice to the research as well. I appreciate her & The Atlantic for publishing this piece.
- macjohnmcc 4y agoPretty much guaranteed to always be the agony of defeat.
- anoncow 4y agoYouTube Link for the videos - https://youtu.be/w-ngnnhcT-s https://youtu.be/w-ngnnhcT-s
- millerm 4y agoThank you.
- dtgriscom 4y agoMore video of them jumping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ngnnhcT-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ngnnhcT-s
- Morizero 4y agoThe cherry on top of this comedy is a researcher named Pie studying Pumpkin toadlets
- goldenkey 4y agoSeen this one recently which struck me as oddly serendipitous: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25979629/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25979629/ Authors Roberta Heale 1, Alison Twycross 2
- benj111 4y agoIs this an example of nomitive determinism?
- leipert 4y agoYou might enjoy this paper by the surgeons Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb: https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/147363515X14134529299420#/doi/10.1308/147363515X14134529299420 https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/147363515X141345...
- echelon 4y ago> The vestibular structures in these frogs are so smol that they verge on nonfunctional, making it extraordinarily difficult for the amphibians to orient themselves in space while walking, much less maneuver mid-flight. Unrelated, but I love that words like "smol" are entering the vernacular.
- bowsamic 4y agoInteresting. I actually hate it
- goldenkey 4y agoSmol-brain sentiment! ;-)
- barry-cotter 4y agoJoys of getting old. See also sus.
- Rerarom 4y agoScrolled down for this
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoThese frogs are too smol to even interest sneks. Another survival technique?
- mncharity 4y ago> Landings this catastrophic [...] Size also throttles the consequences of impact - the mice bounce, humans break, horses splash pattern. Other fun is the short jump distance-compared-with-body-length - inertial mass vs drag goes as L^3 vs L^2. And short legs encourage high takeoff accelerations - flea jumps are bottlenecked on 100+ G tolerance. Mating calls can also be size-bottlenecked in creation. Smaller crocodilians used to exist, but extinctions left only those with long-range infrasound calls. Which you have to be long to make. So adult males have been trapped large. Perhaps they too will someday escape.
- hinkley 4y agoHeavier cyclists love this volume:surface area fact and joke about getting to the bottom of the hill faster. Of course if there’s another hill on the other side, the jokes end pretty quickly.
- eru 4y agoJokes aside, cyclists also have to worry about dumping waste heat into the environment. Bigger entities have to worry about air drag less, but have to worry about cooling more.
- chrischen 4y agoWhat's great about nature and survival is that it often has a mind of its own completely different from what we as humans think how something is supposed to be, whether it's sexuality or frog jumping behavior.
- mastersummoner 4y ago> others pirouetting in an almost rotisserie-esque spin. This article had me in honest-to-god tears multiple times while still being informative and interesting. Good show.
- prvc 4y agoOf the two senses I could find of the verb to frog, namely: >To ornament or fasten (a coat, etc.) with trogs and >To hunt frogs for food , neither one makes sense in the context of the headline.
- Cockbrand 4y agoYou may or may not be aware of the “I forgot how to cat” meme, to which the verb “to frog” likely refers: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=i+forgot+how+to+cat https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=i+forgot+how+to+cat
- prvc 4y agoSuspected something along those lines, although taking the tautological sense of the word makes the proposition of whether there are frogs who cannot "frog" (or indeed cats or whatever) dubious. The whole idea is stupid, and not in a good way.
- solveit 4y agoYou can verb every word simply by using it as one, and people understand via context. Unfortunately such nonstandard uses of language are hard to understand for people who are less fluent.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoIt almost looks like a survival technique much more than a means of getting from A to B: A quick escape mechanism combined with playing dead. The article says they prefer to walk, and the videos make it seem as if they're relatively immobile for a few seconds at least after the 'uncontrolled landing'.
- spoonjim 4y agoI find it funny to think of the old school Atlantic reader who doesn’t have an email account and is a member the Princeton Class of 1958 seeing “so smol” and wondering what it means.
- benj111 4y agoBut they didn't answer the most important question. Why a frog is called a toadlet?
- zasdffaa 4y agoSomething's odd. If you go to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplementary-materials https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplemen... and download the movies, they come zipped. If you unzip and compare the sizes, zipped ~8.72MB, unzipped 10.2MB. So zipping saved ~15%, but .mp4 format should be bloody well compressed already to the point that they should not be able to gain anyything from .zip Is this a failure of the mp4 format, or badly-chosen compression settings, or something I don't know?
- darepublic 4y agoNature's no code frog optimizer