Be still like a frog6/3/2023 Urea, a waste that frogs get rid of in their urine, was recently shown to help them survive freezing. Researchers are still studying this and the mechanisms that protect the frog, aside from glucose. Scientists, however, aren’t sure what tells the heart to start beating. It can be sluggish when it first thaws out, and its body needs to replace some damaged cells. "The frog has to go through a repair process," says Costanzo. When the weather gets warmer, the frog melts. But frogs farther north can live through lower temperatures. Frogs in Ohio, in Costanzo’s neck of the woods, can survive about 24 degrees F. If it gets too cold, though, they’ll die. Frogs can survive all winter like this, undergoing cycles of freezing and thawing. When in its frogcicle state, as much as 70 percent of the water in a frog’s body can be frozen, write researchers Jack Layne and Richard Lee in their 1995 article in Climate Research. In fact, if you opened up a frozen frog, the organs would look like "beef jerky" and the frozen water around the organs like a "snow cone," says Jon Costanzo, a physiological ecologist at Miami University in Ohio who studies freeze-tolerance. The frog doesn’t use oxygen and actually appears to be dead. As the wood frog is freezing, its heart continues pumping the protective glucose around its body, but the frog’s heart slows and eventually stops.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |