FROG BLOG: FROG FOREVER

 

Frogbloginning (Frog-blog-beginning) 

 

And here we are again. It’s time… for the frog finale. The frog finale waits for no one, not even the past frog blog just a post before it. This is the final blog of senior year, and thus my final blog post at MSA. 

These two years have been everything in a heart and skull. There’s so much to leave, and leaving it dredges up blue tinted reminiscence. I don’t want to make my sendoff bittersweet. I’ll have all the time to taste that flavor at graduation, to sit with it on the car ride home. I want this goodbye to be frog. To be me. To be something I can be happy leaving! Which is frog. All of that is frog. Frogtastic, even. Obviously, there is no true escaping bittersweetness, but I can still make it me, and I can make it something I love. 

So, to you I say goodbye, but plant your feet just for frog! I want to start us off with a fun fact about general frog biology. I say general because nature knows that if there isn’t an exception now, there has been or will be. But our funky frogs sport no foveas (a small depression in our retinas where we have highest visual acuity). (source). They can spot tiny changes, but struggle with still scenery, so skittering bugs are easier for them to spot than a motionless rock. Everything stuck in stasis blurs into obscurity. This is all fine by frogs, however, because they’re sit and wait predators. It’s not like they’re going to track down their prey, and any prey is good prey anyways. Evolution just didn’t see a point in meddling with frog vision any further.  

Now, let us behold: the frogs!

Fowler’s Toad (Anaxyrus fowleri) 

(Source 1) (Source 2) 

This is a frog you’ve likely seen before if you live in the US. They’re pretty much the most common frog where I live in the south! Well, toad, but remember, for as long as I may repeat it: all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads. It makes me smile to include Fowler’s toads at long last, because for how often I’ve seen them, a majority of my life they never had a name. When I was younger, my Oma used to take me and my sibling out looking for them. And they’re Fowler’s toads! Not to be confused with the American toad (Anaxyrus americanus), which not only looks similar, but commonly hybridizes with the Fowler’s toad. (See this visual from the Virgina Herpetology Society!) Unhybridized Fowler’s toads can be made clear by their pure white bellies, which can sometimes sport one central spot at most. As for the name, which I was personally curious about, is from herpetologist Mary. H. Hinckley, who named it the Fowler’s toad in honor of naturalist Samuel P. Fowler. 

 

American Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea, also called Dryophytes cinereus) 

(Source 1) (Source 2) (Source 3) 

I’ve actually only seen these guys a few times, but each time I have, it’s been a joy! Which is no surprise, coming from the frog person. I remember the first time I saw one as a kid, my first thought was that it must have escaped from somewhere, because Mississippi surely couldn’t have cool tropic-looking rainforest-maybe frogs. But then I realized I had just never seen them before, always having assumed Fowler’s toads were the default around here. The reason I saw Fowler’s toads more was probably because green treefrogs are aboreal! They like things from leaves to branches to the eaves of buildings. They also have calls for alarming other green tree frogs of danger, and they’re known to make their calls louder before rainfall. Also, despite the green in their title, they can change to shades of brown depending on temperature or stress levels. You might remember another frog species doing the same thing from previous blogs! It’s more common than you’d think! The green treefrogs I’ve seen have had sunny yellow dots along their backs as well.  

 

Southern Chorus Frog 

(Source 1) (Source 2) 

This part is for a frog I haven’t actually met at all! Their species is native to where I live, but alas, we are unacquainted. As froglets, they tend to stay near their birth pond, but with age they move outwards to pine forests, then back to shallows during breeding season. They like sand they can burrow into and limestone sinkholes, too! They spend most of dry season nestled nicely underground. Southern chorus frogs are called chorus frogs because of their distinctive call, which the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission describes as sounding like, “A mechanical, rasping trill, which some say resembles the sound of a ratchet-type wrench.” They sound pretty cool; you can look up videos online! The name itself is also just really neat sounding. Southern chorus frog. 

 

Frogblogending (Frog-blog-ending)  

 

And those are some frogs! I went with a bit of a theme this time, as you might have seen. Most of the frogs I put here are frogs we might not get the pleasure to see face to face; ones so outside our scope of reality that they’re easy to just absorb as nothing more than knowledge. So I wanted to do something closer to home for this final frog blog. This is a time that deserves a marker, after all. I think that there will still be Fowler’s toads at my college. If you ever want to learn more about these guys, there’s tons of sources online! Finding sources for these guys even pointed me to the websites of wildlife agencies for different states. AmphibiaWeb is fun to scrounge about on, too! 

To my blog, I think I should say goodbye. But goodbye sounds too final. I like the sound of “I’ll see you later,” more. So, I’ll see you later. Frog on!