A frog so small, it could not frog | Hacker News Reader

A frog so small, it could not frog

theatlantic.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115247/https://www.theat...

The synopsis for this is: a type of frog is very small, and their vestibular systems are too small to work properly - so jumping results in an "uncontrolled landing". And the videos[1] are about as funny as you can imagine!

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplemen... -> Other supplementary materials -> Movies S1 to S6; S1 is a reference frog, S2-6 are the mentioned frog

Amazing. I need these set to actual commentary on the Olympic ski jump.

The article is a fun read; it’s informative and has a humorous bent, and it avoids coming across as pretentious or lacking detail.

The site’s “paywall” is just a banner over the full content of the article, making it amenable to Reader mode. It’s like a 2 minute read. Just read it.

I mostly just wanted to show people the cool frog videos :) of course people should read the article, but now those who don't also got to enjoy them.

Katherine J. Wu did not hold back in roasting the poor frog, Yet did complete justice to the research as well. I appreciate her & The Atlantic for publishing this piece.

Pretty much guaranteed to always be the agony of defeat.

YouTube Link for the videos - https://youtu.be/w-ngnnhcT-s

Thank you.

> Landings this catastrophic [...]

Size also throttles the consequences of impact - the mice bounce, humans break, horses splash pattern.

Other fun is the short jump distance-compared-with-body-length - inertial mass vs drag goes as L^3 vs L^2. And short legs encourage high takeoff accelerations - flea jumps are bottlenecked on 100+ G tolerance.

Mating calls can also be size-bottlenecked in creation. Smaller crocodilians used to exist, but extinctions left only those with long-range infrasound calls. Which you have to be long to make. So adult males have been trapped large. Perhaps they too will someday escape.

Heavier cyclists love this volume:surface area fact and joke about getting to the bottom of the hill faster. Of course if there’s another hill on the other side, the jokes end pretty quickly.

Jokes aside, cyclists also have to worry about dumping waste heat into the environment.

Bigger entities have to worry about air drag less, but have to worry about cooling more.

Amazing. This is now my second-favourite frog, with the number one still being the squeaky Desert Rain Frog[1] :D

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBxn56l9WcU

omg

Just watch the video, you will not be disappointed.

I never thought I'd have a favourite frog, but now I do!

More video of them jumping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ngnnhcT-s

It almost looks like a survival technique much more than a means of getting from A to B: A quick escape mechanism combined with playing dead.

The article says they prefer to walk, and the videos make it seem as if they're relatively immobile for a few seconds at least after the 'uncontrolled landing'.

> others pirouetting in an almost rotisserie-esque spin.

This article had me in honest-to-god tears multiple times while still being informative and interesting. Good show.

The cherry on top of this comedy is a researcher named Pie studying Pumpkin toadlets

Seen this one recently which struck me as oddly serendipitous:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25979629/

Authors Roberta Heale 1, Alison Twycross 2

Is this an example of nomitive determinism?

You might enjoy this paper by the surgeons Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb:

https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/147363515X141345...

What's great about nature and survival is that it often has a mind of its own completely different from what we as humans think how something is supposed to be, whether it's sexuality or frog jumping behavior.

I find it funny to think of the old school Atlantic reader who doesn’t have an email account and is a member the Princeton Class of 1958 seeing “so smol” and wondering what it means.

> The vestibular structures in these frogs are so smol that they verge on nonfunctional, making it extraordinarily difficult for the amphibians to orient themselves in space while walking, much less maneuver mid-flight.

Unrelated, but I love that words like "smol" are entering the vernacular.

Interesting. I actually hate it

Smol-brain sentiment! ;-)

Joys of getting old. See also sus.

Scrolled down for this

These frogs are too smol to even interest sneks. Another survival technique?

But they didn't answer the most important question. Why a frog is called a toadlet?

Something's odd. If you go to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1104#supplemen... and download the movies, they come zipped. If you unzip and compare the sizes, zipped ~8.72MB, unzipped 10.2MB.

So zipping saved ~15%, but .mp4 format should be bloody well compressed already to the point that they should not be able to gain anyything from .zip

Is this a failure of the mp4 format, or badly-chosen compression settings, or something I don't know?

Nature's no code frog optimizer

Of the two senses I could find of the verb to frog, namely:

>To ornament or fasten (a coat, etc.) with trogs

and

>To hunt frogs for food

, neither one makes sense in the context of the headline.

You may or may not be aware of the “I forgot how to cat” meme, to which the verb “to frog” likely refers:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=i+forgot+how+to+cat

Suspected something along those lines, although taking the tautological sense of the word makes the proposition of whether there are frogs who cannot "frog" (or indeed cats or whatever) dubious. The whole idea is stupid, and not in a good way.

You can verb every word simply by using it as one, and people understand via context. Unfortunately such nonstandard uses of language are hard to understand for people who are less fluent.

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