Post #14763

stomach and increase mucus production. How the frogs were able to connect two completely different processes still remains a mystery, but they did it perfectly! Prostaglandins from the shell of the eggs, entering the stomach, practically stopped the production of acid, but not the production of mucus. Also, hormones were most likely responsible for stopping the motility of the stomach: normally, this organ should contract to move food further, but for caviar such tricks would be fatal. It turns out that under the influence of the eggs, the stomach turned from a digestive organ into something like a uterus, except that there was no umbilical cord - the eggs and later the tadpoles received nutrients from the yolk sac. Yes, exactly tadpoles! Caring mothers carried the young for up to 40+ days until it went through a full cycle of metamorphosis from a bunch of cells to a miniature version of an adult. As the babies grew, the space inside the mother frog became less and less. Her gastrointestinal tract completely stopped working, her lungs compressed and practically stopped moving air. All gas exchange took place exclusively through the skin, so it was extremely important for the mother to remain slightly moist at all times. When the development of the frogs ended, the mother evicted them in exactly the same way as they got there - through the mouth. True, there is a small nuance here. She swallowed 40 eggs, and the resulting babies were half as many. Scientists still don’t understand where half went. Perhaps they were not viable to begin with. Or maybe the female simply digested part of her offspring - now this is not known for certain. But even despite all this, the strategy of caring frogs was very successful, because the young were born completely independent and capable of quickly jumping away from predators. You probably noticed that the article talks about frogs in the past tense - made, invented, raised. Yes, unfortunately, today the caring frogs no longer use their strange method of pregnancy - they are extinct. What killed these unusual animals? Unfortunately, most likelythey were people. Less than a hundred years ago, there were two species of caring frogs in the world, barely distinguishable in appearance. Females were slightly larger than males, and during pregnancy they grew even larger. Amphibians occupied small habitats in southern Australia, small rivers, streams and lakes. They were few in number and extremely vulnerable to everything new. People contributed to the introduction of a terrible parasitic fungus into their habitat, which over the course of several decades greatly reduced the population of such unusual creatures. And since frogs were already few in number, extinction was not long in coming. Scientists, however, managed to make a bunch of notes, experiments and collect many tissue and DNA samples. Today, this material is used in several projects to resurrect caring amphibians. There are no live croaking samples f