You need to have some survival tricks up your sleeve when you're just a squishy squishy frog.
The frog goes on the offensive and strikes out with toxins. Camouflage is used to hide from the eyes of predatory animals. The Fleischmann's glass frog is camouflaged by transparency.
The nocturnal frog limits their chances of becoming lunch by creeping about at night. It blends into the background during the day when it finds a nice leaf that is green in color.
The risks that a sleeping glass frog faces are not easily mitigated by hiding beneath the foliage.
A blobby little frog can form a frog-shaped silhouette when the sun shines down on a translucent leaf.
Fleischmann's glass frog is able to cast a shadow as it sleeps because of its skin and flesh.
A group of scientists, led by Carlos Taboada of Duke University, noticed that the little salamanders have a trick that increases their self-preservation. The translucency of a Fleischmann's glass frog increases when it has a nap.
Taboada and colleagues write that glass frog's bones and other organs can be seen through their muscles and skin.
More than 90 to 95 percent of visible light is transmitted by these tissues. Glass Frogs sleep on vegetation during the day, which camouflages them from predatory animals at night.
Red blood cells can make tissues opaque. Glass frog is an exception to the rare trait of transparency. Taboada studied the frog to figure out their trick.
They took 11 Fleischmann's glass frog and used color photography to measure their transparency at different times.
The frog were more transparent when they were asleep.
The decrease in circulating red blood cells is the reason for the increased transparency on the underside of 13 frog. The red blood circulation decreased by up to 89 percent.
Most of the red blood cells in the frog's body are sequestered in their stomach. Red blood cells can go about their normal activity after they wake up. It's wonderful.
When glassFrogs want to be transparent, they hide all the red blood cells out of their blood, so they don't create a huge blood clot.
The cells are brought back into the blood stream when the frog needs to get active again.
It's not known how the glass frog does this, and if it can be a voluntary response to other situations. It's not clear if the frog can experience dramatic changes in circulation without damaging their other organs.
Fleischmann's glass frog has the ability to store red blood cells in the body while sleeping. The circulating red blood cells of the three frog species decreased while they were sleeping.
There are some interesting implications for human health from the fact that an animal can remove nearly 90 percent of its blood from circulation while sleeping. The fact that they manage to do this on a daily basis without the blood clotting means that their blood cells may have some modifications that act against clotting while the blood is being packed and unloaded, which could help scientists develop new interventions to prevent strokes.
The naturally transparent animals are an excellent animal for research. Their entire body can be imaged with cellular resolution to capture natural hemodynamic processes.
Glass frog's ability to regulate the location, density, and packing of red blood cells without clotting offers insight in blood-clot research.
The research has appeared in a journal.
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