Frogs in full spring

timdrobinson

1 year ago

A circle with a dot in the middle could represent…

…a solar system? Something smaller perhaps: an atom? Too small. A cell and nucleus? Let’s go for something a little bigger – and something that I saw a lot of today on the second day of Spring in Belgium: a single frog egg.

There are many more male common frogs than females (photo Tim Robinson)

You can see here why it’s called the ‘russet frog’ (grenouille rousse) in French (photo Tim Robinson)

However, their colour varies a lot from one individual to the next – and this one has turquoise eye liner! (photo Tim Robinson)

Easy to see why the females are larger: on top of a belly full of eggs, they have a male to carry! (photo Tim Robinson)

Amphibians have been around for over 300 million years – three times longer than mammals. They were the second class of animals to colonise land, after insects. They have stood the test of time – until now. The current extinction rate of amphibians could be over 200 times the background extinction rate. They are fragile and important.