Amazing Animals:
FROGS
• “Amphibian” comes from the Greek words meaning “two lives” since the frog can live both in the water and on the land. • Frogs always croak, right? Wrong. The European tree frog sounds like a quacking duck. Another kind of frog sounds like a cat meowing. • Frogs have no ribs. • A frog closes its eyes by pulling the eyeballs deeper into the sockets, which serves to close the eyelids. • A frog's tongue is attached to the front of its mouth to give a longer reach. • Do frogs have teeth? Just two tiny teeth in the upper jaw, which keep prey from getting away. • A frog does not need to drink water because it absorbs water through its skin. • A frog’s thigh, shin, and foot are of nearly equal length, to make jumping easier. • A bullfrog with a six-inch body can leap ten times its own body length. • Tadpoles are generally born being one sex or the other, but environmental influences can change the frog’s sex. If food is scarce or the temperature is not right, the transformation of female tadpoles into male frogs keeps the population down until conditions improve in the pond. • Some frogs have lived for 20 years. One toad lived 36 years. • If you pick up a frog while you have insect repellent on your hands, the frog will absorb it through the skin and become very sick.
• Handling a toad does not cause warts. • Frogs don’t always lay their eggs in ponds. • The Malaysian hill frog lives high in the mountains where there are few ponds, so it lays its eggs in damp moss that hangs from trees. The tadpoles develop into frogs there. • One kind of poison dart frog lays eggs on moist vegetation, and then watches over the eggs until the tadpoles hatch. Then the young crawl up on the backs of either parent and are literally glued in place by a mucous secretion. They are attached there for more than a week, until the parent can find a pool to release them. The water loosens the mucous bond, and the young swim free. • Bullfrogs can lay 20,000 eggs at a time. On the other hand, some kinds of dart-poison frogs will lay a single tiny egg in each of the miniature “ponds” that forms when rainwater collects in the base of a leaf. The mother frog will also lay a number of unfertilized eggs next to the fertilized egg so the tadpole will have something to eat when it hatches. • The eggs of the horned marsupial frog are placed on the mother’s back, where a pouch of skin grows around them to protect them. Tadpoles of the frog hatch and develop in that pouch, completing their development into frogs without ever seeing water. • The male midwife toad will wrap the long sticky strands of eggs around his legs, hopping around with them until they are ready to hatch. Then he deposits them in the water. • The eggs of the leopard frog are white on one side and black on the other. The white part contains the genetic material; the black part contains a barrier to ultraviolet light. When exposed to light, the egg rotates its black side up, blocking the UV radiation and absorbing heat that helps with incubation.
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Weekly SUDOKU
Answer
King CROSSWORD
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