Coqui frogs in the Puerto Rican rainforest seem to hear through their lungs.
The noisiest sound in the Puerto Rican rainforest comes from coqui frogs that seem to hear through their lungs. Are these the world's most amazing living frogs?
Coqui frogs! Lovesick frogs of the rainforest!
If you spend an
evening in the rainforests of Puerto Rico, be sure to take your
earplugs. For hours into the night, the rainforests of this
Caribbean island come alive with the sound of music. A rasping
orchestra of insects and other creatures joins a chorus of noisy
frogs to create a deafening din.
Researchers working in the rainforest say the noise is so loud they have difficulty hearing themselves think.
The noisiest sound comes from the male coqui frogs. Every few seconds these lovesick frogs blast out their thunderous “co-kee” mating call.
These calls can reach 100 decibels only a meter away.
Why don’t they deafen themselves?
To learn how coqui flogs distinguish their own species' sounds in such a noisy environment, and perhaps find out why they don't deafen themselves, Peter M. Narins from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) visited the rainforests of Puerto Rico. He collected the loudest frogs he could find, and took them to Germany's Konstanz University, where researchers were measuring eardrum vibrations with laser beams.
But the frogs refused to croak in this strange environment. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March 1988 (vol. 85 no.5), Narins and his associates told how they played recordings of coqui calls to the frogs in the university to measure the frogs' eardrum movements.
Hearing through lungs
Late one night, while using the laser beam on a frog, Narins' hand slipped and the laser beam moved to the frog's side over its lung. The researchers were astonished to find that this spot was vibrating with the eardrums.
Narins found that when sound impinged on the frog's lungs, the pressure in its mouth cavity changed. German researchers Ehret and Tautz further found that sound travelling through the lungs actually made the eardrum vibrate.
Does this mean coqui frogs hear through their lungs? Narins says that what they found is not a main pathway to the eardrums but a complementary one. When a sound wave hits a coqui frog's side, it travels through the air-filled lungs up through the voice box into the hearing canals (Eustachian tubes), and on to the eardrum.
Other animals with unusual abilities
Coqui frogs are not alone in using body parts other than ears to help them hear. A Danish researcher showed that the same lung pathway exists in green tree frogs. Another has shown that snakes transfer sound through their lungs to their ears. Dolphins and porpoises transmit sound through their oil-filled lower jaws.
How many other creatures possess unusual sound passages that help them hear? No one knows. But the fact that structures in some creatures serve more than one purpose shows that God, the Creator of all life, has been highly efficient in maximizing the functions that individual body parts in these animals can perform.
And it is another reason why we must continue to work vigilantly to protect the world's rainforests.
Frog floats in mid-air
Scientists from two universities made a frog float in mid-air. The levitation worked when they created a giant magnetic field that slightly distorted the orbits of electrons in the frogs' atoms. The researchers, from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, also made grasshoppers, plants, and fish float. They say there is no reason why a human couldn't float the same way.
> Other Oddspots
Repel mosquitoes: Rub a frog on your skin!
Researchers have found that some Australian frogs create their own insect repellent, resembling rotten meat, roasted cashew nuts, or thyme leaves. The research team included Associate Professor Mike Tyler of the University of Adelaide.
Frogs produce a number of chemicals in their skin, including hallucinogens, glues and anti-microbials, to ward off infection and stop other animals from trying to eat them. Using massage and acupuncture techniques, the researchers stimulated the muscles beneath the frogs' skins to produce secretions.
The team found that the skin secretions from an Australian green tree frog, for example, protected a mouse from mosquitoes when the secretion was applied.
> Other Oddspots
Related topics:
| Main page || Creation Tips || Teen Topics || Crystal Clear Creation || DinosaurCam || Games || Newsdesk |
Email: creationmail@creationtips.ws
Website: www.creationtips.ws
Copyright © Creation Tips and its
licensors. All rights reserved.
Rated
by Internet Content Rating Association