Very cool with gorgeous pictures from the BBC:
So many shapes… I wish they’d embed their chants! What’s with most of them having pitch black eyes? Is that common in American frogs?
That’s an excellent question. I think frogs have some of the most beautiful and entrancing eyes of any species on Earth, so it surprised me to see I hadn’t focused on them. Accidental wordplay twice over lol, accidental too!
Looked at the images and all but one seem to be like you mentioned so I’m going to throw a theory out there and say maybe it was the environment they took the images in which was dark so we’re seeing mostly pupil? Hmm, no, because my frogs still show their amazing iris’s in low light.
Though now that I think about it, when they come out from the cold you can’t see any color.
All that is it say I’m not sure. It would have been nice to have some of the images taken in brighter light. The Chubby Grey frog looks like it has blue speckles at the top of its eyeball.
Sort of related - I was just reading about how tarantulas and frogs sometimes live together in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Young spiders have sometimes been observed to grab the frogs, examine them with their mouthparts, and then release them unharmed.
That is unreal.