Friday, March 16, 2012

Too much testosterone....





Do frogs have testosterone? I don't know, but what I do know is that there's amazing pent-up aggression in the frogs in our garden pond. This one surfaced just in front of my pocket camera which is small and waterproof - ideal for pond photography - but it's also silver.


The white throat patch of a frog, which inflates when it calls - also seems to be be part of its visual challenge display to rival males and I suspect that it probably mistook the bright gleam of my camera in the sunlight for a rival frog - so it lunged....




.... and he may well now have a bruised nose. You can see the eardrum quite nicely in this picture, just behind the eye.


Once male frogs find a mate they tend to hang on to them come what may - which makes them much more approachable............

8 comments:

  1. Great shots Phil.

    The frogs in my pond are very vocal at the moment, and a lot of frogspawn too lol

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  2. Attacked by a frog = that must be a first lol. No sign of any in my pond yet. Have never noticed the eardrum before.

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  3. Great shots. They are fascinating to watch. I agree with you about the white throat, it is like a torch, so hard to get a good shot where the white is not overexposed and the rest of body not underexposed! I bet females track them down using the white as cue.

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  4. Hi Keith, The frogs delivered the first load of spawn to our pond this week - looks like we are going to host a very large tadpole population!

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  5. I think you're right Africa. There behaviour seems to be quite complex to me - there's an awful lot of splashing and kicking water around and I think the ripples as well as the sound might have some kind of stimulus too. I once recorded their mating calls and played the recording back to a pond full of frogs, which all stopped 'purring', turned to face he speaker then began advancing towards it ...... quite intimidating!

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  6. Lovely shots. We spotted the first frog spawn of the year yesterday when on a bike ride in our local forest. This was just in a large puddle in the track, but as this side track is currently blocked with at least 20 fallen trees, the spawn is in no danger of being squashed by vehicles.

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  7. When I checked today our small pond had eight separate blobs of spawn, swanscot - it's going to be crowded in there when the tadpoles hatch!

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