10 ms·
Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years (2019)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250920115133/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-44886585 https://web.archive.org/web/20250920115133/https://www.bbc.c...
https://archive.ph/oCd19 https://archive.ph/oCd19
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoThat headline confused the heck out of me, but that was an interesting read.
- anself 1y agoCame here to say this! So many ways to parse it. But the key issue was not knowing that “pregnancy-test frogs” was the central concept. Without that, the headline is so confusing… at some point I had to consider whether “frogs” was being used as a verb
- spcebar 1y agoIt's very weirdly worded. Clearer would be: A type of frog which was once used as pregnancy test escaped and colonoised Wales for 50 years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- temp0826 1y agoLife uh finds a way?
- tomrod 1y agoUntil nature killed it!
- tialaramex 1y agoRight. Ian Malcolm's one miss here is that Mother Nature is so cold that she's also OK with life uh, not finding a way at all. The warm damp rock does not care that there's stuff growing on it.
- jasongill 1y agoI think the intent of the "life finds a way" quote is not that "a single life finds a way" more so that "life, as a biological system, finds a way"
- tialaramex 1y agoThat was my intention too. The rock doesn't care that there's any stuff living on it. Frogs. Cats. Humans. Algae. Things running entirely on chemosynthesis in the deep ocean. The warm damp rock will still be warm and damp if they all die, in a broader sense nothing changes.
- nashashmi 1y agoUntil global warming causes havoc?
- tomrod 1y agoThat was fascinating. Why would the frogs produce eggs? Were the eggs sterile or parthogenic/clones of mum?
- shiandow 1y agoSomerhing to do with heightened estrogen levels probably, those levels increase a thousandfold or so during pregnancy.
- rsynnott 1y ago(Most?) frogs do external fertilisation; all frog eggs are haploid when they come out of the frog.
- tomrod 1y agoAh yes, forgot that bit of biology. Thanks for the reminder
- culturestate 1y agoThis story is incredible, I’m fascinated by every aspect of it: - What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place? - How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here? - Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin? - Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden? I crave a one-hour documentary about this.
- tdeck 1y agoSpeaking of the frog test, there is apparently an old expression "the rabbit died" in English to refer to someone being pregnant. The original test involved injecting urine into a rabbit, killing it after a few days, and examining it's ovaries https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_rabbit_died https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_rabbit_died https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test The frog was an improvement since you didn't have to kill the frog (apparently they could survive the urine injection). FWIW the rabbit always died whether you were pregnant or not :(.
- OptionOfT 1y agoThe rabbit died because it had to be autopsied to inspect the ovaries. Whether a woman was pregnant or not didn't determine whether the rabbit died.
- tdeck 1y agoWhat an astute reading of the text of my comment.
- OptionOfT 1y agoI reacted to: > FWIW the rabbit always died whether you were pregnant or not :(. It's not that an injection of urine if a pregnant woman kills the rabbit. It's like the rabies test on the brain. We cannot look at the brain before you're dead, because the act of looking at it would kill you.
- marcodiego 1y agoAnd I spent a long time thinking how could frogs colonise a whale.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoMe too, right after I got done wondering how an escapee pregnancy test differed from a normal one.
- gus_massa 1y agoFun fact: The frogs also can change color from black to green and back (perhaps dark green to light green). They have some cells in the skin with black blobs full of melanin, and they can move them. Usually they are disperse and the color is dark, but with some hormone the blobs are transported to the nuclei of the cell and the color is light. We used cells of this frog in a undergaduate lab for physics. The main task was to fine tune a microscope to track the blobs. So we cultivate the cells for a week (from a cell line, the original frog was gone long ago), we put the cells under the microscope and add an hormone to force the change of color in a minute or so. (I think in the wild the change of color is very slow.) Something like this (not my video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJSA_v0ics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJSA_v0ics
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- satellite2 1y agoI'm more surprised they did not mix with local species. Are those not genetically compatible?
- pfdietz 1y agoWhy would you imagine they would be?
- shijie 1y agoNot an inaccurate title, but very hard to parse!
- anigbrowl 1y agoResearchers tracked them down to two areas, but kept their location secret Why? Annoyingly typical of the BBS to throw in that detail and not follow it up.
- pell 1y ago> [..] Bristol University conducted extensive long-term research projects on them whilst keeping the location secret. They kept it secret to not disturb the research they were conducting.
- anigbrowl 1y agoBut why? Secret from who? Is there some ring of frog thieves at work? Are frogs considered a national security issue? What I'm questioning is this posture of secrecy as a default without any apparent reason for it.
- gus_massa 1y agoToday, I'd blame influencers that would like to go there to take a photo or piss on the frogs and upload the videos to social media. (And a few persons that want a exotig pet frog too.)
- JJMcJ 1y agoSince when did BBC become subscription only in the USA?
- diego_moita 1y agoThis has to be the best title I've ever seen on HN!
- peepee1982 1y agoHow the fuck does anyone try injecting a woman's urine under a frog's skin?!?