John Gould, an amphibian scientist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, had wandered into a dense thicket of vegetation around a pond when he first spotted the fluffy frogs. Frogs are not usually fluffy, so Gould took a closer look and discovered that the frogs were covered in the wispy seeds of Typha orientalis, a common pond plant also known as the broad-leaved cumbungi.
[Related: Check out some of the weirdest warty frogs in North America.]
“It immediately reminded me of a recent science story about a frog that was found to carry pollen on its skin,” Gould told PopSci via email. “Which made me think it might be possible for frogs to do the same thing but with seeds.”
Plants have evolved many different ways of spreading their seeds around the planet. Some seeds have adapted to float on the wind, some can float through water, and others simply drop on the ground and hope for the best. But one of the most ingenious ways plants spread is through animals. They can coax wildlife to eat fruits containing their seeds or even cover their seeds in bristles that stick to the fur of an animal, who drops those seeds far away.
But while this phenomenon has been widely studied in animals like birds and mammals, this new observation could be one of the first documented instances of seed dispersal in an amphibian.
“I think we often have a simplistic view of the environment and how species interact within these systems,” Gould said.
The frogs that Gould spotted were Litoria fallax, or Eastern dwarf tree frogs, a small green species native to Australia’s east coast. After the initial spotting, he and his colleague collected some data to investigate how common it was for these tree frogs to end up covered in Typha seeds and published their results on January 3 in the journal Ethology.
The team…
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