January 30, 2025
2 min learn
Watch a Frog Stroll on Water with Excessive-Velocity Stomach Flops
Tiny frogs appear to skim the water’s floor, however high-speed video reveals their secret
Graduate researcher Talia Weiss observes a cricket frog, whose uncommon locomotion lets it seem to skip throughout the water’s floor.
For those who flick a flat stone towards a pond at simply the fitting angle, it skips throughout in a sequence of easy jumps. Inch-long cricket frogs additionally appear to skitter over the floor of water with physics-defying grace. However when Talia Weiss, then a bioengineering graduate pupil at Virginia Tech, filmed the frogs with a high-speed digicam, she noticed a really completely different image.
“The motion is so fast that if you look at it with the naked eye, you really can’t tell the difference,” Weiss says.
For a brand new examine within the Journal of Experimental Biology, Weiss and her co-authors recorded skittering cricket frogs from above and beneath the floor at 500 frames per second after which performed the movies again rather more slowly. The researchers discovered that as an alternative of hopping with simply their ft breaking the floor, as older research had described anecdotally, the frogs have been really doing a sequence of stomach flops—sinking for a fraction of a second after which kicking themselves upward with every soar.
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Sluggish-motion view of the cricket frog stomach flop.
Reasonably than really skittering throughout water like basilisk lizards do, the frogs have been “porpoising”—leaping from the water as they swim. Weiss says their legs could also be too sluggish for true floor hopping.
“To jump on the water surface, you have to have your legs retracted and ready to push down again by the time you’re approaching the water in every jump,” she explains. “And these [frogs] don’t prepare for their landing at all; they sort of just belly flop. They don’t retract their legs fast enough to immediately jump again” from the floor itself.
“Fast animal movements can be really deceiving,” and the brand new camerawork reveals what the frogs are literally doing, says Jasmine Nirody, an organismal biologist on the College of Chicago, who was not concerned within the examine. By rigorously analyzing such motions, “we can think about how we might be able to use [the frog’s] strategy in various bioinspired robots,” she provides. “Now we know what to look for.”
