Frogs fake their deaths to avoid harassing males

2023-10-18 13:26:56

During the season of reproduction of European frogs, which lasts just two weeks, the supply of males is much greater than that of females. To access them, they usually harass them, intimidate them and force them to copulate, which can cost them their lives.

But against the widespread idea that They are passive and unable to resist coerciona investigation published in the magazine Royal Society Open Science It showed that they are empowered enough to resist any attack.

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Addressing these dynamics, Carolin Dittrich – from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology in Vienna – found that although females insisted on evasive maneuvers, males did not take the hints of rejection. When she began to observe them in detail, she detected three partner avoidance strategies.

The most common was rotation, where the female tries to rotate on her own axis to escape the male’s grasp. The second, a protest transmitted as a deep, low-frequency growl.

Female frogs fake their deaths to avoid matings they reject | Profile

The third, and most surprising, was tonic immobility: play dead. The females rigidly extended their arms and legs for several minutes, remaining completely motionless. In one of the videos analyzed, a male drags an unresponsive female. When he releases her, she holds her position until he turns around, and then it swims away.

The research revealed that female rejection is a matter of preference. Many times they choose not to mate with the first male that latches onto them, but with the largest or the one with the deepest edge. “We have seen cases in which they carry a male on their back for days and even weeks, waiting for a larger one,” explained Iñigo Martínez-Solano, from the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences.

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Although these strategies are as old as frogs, had not been detected before. It is that the investigations tended to focus on male behavior“something that is slowly changing, to also include the female perspective,” Dittrich celebrated.

FM JL