A widely-circulated image of a frosty frog is probably of a garden ornament. For the real survivor, watch the video.
I don’t like to click on links friends post on Facebook because I don’t want Facebook to know that much about my interests (not they it doesn’t have other ways to find out). So if I’m curious, I do a Google search.
When I did a search on “frozen Alaskan Tree Frog,” hoping to find out about the frozen-frog photo you have probably seen, all the references were to Facebook pages. I was suspicious.
When you are suspicious about an Internet meme, where do you go? Snopes.com, of course. And that is where I found out that although there are frogs that can survive freezing conditions, the photo that is all over the web is not of one of them.
Here’s what Snopes says. “While there is a species of frog in Alaska that can survive the area’s harsh winters, that species is not the ‘Alaskan tree frog.’ … There is no animal known as an Alaskan tree frog.
“There is, however, an amphibian that lives in Alaska and has an unusually high tolerance for freezing conditions. In August 2013, a report was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology explaining how the wood frog was able to survive long winters in Alaska:
There are a number of creatures, from reptiles and insects to marine life, that possess some level of freeze tolerance, but few can perform the trick quite like Rana sylvatica. The tiny amphibians can survive for weeks with an incredible two-thirds of their body water completely frozen — to the point where they are essentially solid frogsicles.
Even more incredible is the fact that the wood frogs stop breathing and their hearts stop beating entirely for days to weeks at a time. In fact, during its period of frozen winter hibernation, the frogs’ physical processes — from metabolic activity to waste production — grind to a near halt. What’s more, the frogs are likely to endure multiple freeze/ thaw episodes over the course of a winter.
The way wood frogs avoid freezing to death is due to so-called cryoprotectants — solutes that lower the freezing temperature of the animal’s tissues. These include glucose (blood sugar) and urea and have been found in much higher concentrations in the Alaskan wood frogs than in their southern counterparts.
Photo: http://www.alaskacenters.gov/images/wood_frog.png
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