For Frogs, It’s Not Easy Being Green, Gay, and on ‘Shrooms
Table of contents:
Frogs have a Fungus Amongus
A fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), is single-handedly responsible for the greatest disease-caused loss of biodiversity in recorded history. It’s a parasitic skin fungus that grows on most amphibians causing a disease known as chytridiomycosis.
Around the 90s, scientists started noticing frogs dying in droves. They literally walked into the jungle and found what looked like the remnants of my average play-through of Frogger. And this has only sped up since. In the last 30 years, 200 amphibian species have been driven into extinction by chytridiomycosis.
Skin infections of Bd kill the frogs by triggering an immune response where the frog sloughs off the top layer of skin. This top layer is only a couple of cells thick but is important for retaining water nonetheless. Without it, the frog gets drier than my sense of humor. Eventually, it dies from a heart attack thanks to the ions in its nerves becoming too concentrated.
Though it sounds gross, frogs slough off their skin in small amounts regularly. So doing this once won’t dehydrate them too much. If it did presumably they wouldn’t have evolved to do it just to get rid of a rash. But unlike most parasitic funguses, Bd can stay on the frog even after the skin sloughs off. Evidentially, despite being highly evolved superior organisms, Frog evolution has not accounted for this. So they just slough off their skin again as soon as it grows back. Then again, and again. They wind up spending too long without a top layer of skin and lose too much of their moisture to the air.
Toads are Unthreatened by Toadstools
There isn’t really anywhere in the world you can’t find this fungus. Humans have been really good at spreading its spores around accidentally. So it’s safe to say that most species of frog are probably screwed. None are immune as far as I know, though larger frogs and toads tend to do better as they don’t dehydrate as quickly.
Bd likely won’t wipe out all frogs and toads on its own. Thanks to our old friend, the square-cube law discussed this previous article about dinosaur feathers. Frogs and toads with a larger ratio of volume to surface area naturally lose water to the air slower.
That’s why the desert rain frog of Tick Toc fame looks so adorably fat. Being shaped like mochi with tiny legs helps them retain water in the dry desert despite being amphibians. Also, they only come out of hibernation when it rains, hence the name. I expect most species of rain frog to survive the Bd pandemic. Which is good, because they’re my favorite. They’re just so fat and tiny.
Toads also tend to be bigger and have thicker skin than frogs. This gives them better chances of surviving a Bd infection than most frogs. We’re not as concerned about them.
I Don’t Like ’em Putting Chemicals in the Water that Turn the Freaking Frogs Gay!
Of course, the fungus is not the only threat to frogkind. Humans are obviously also a major threat to their existence, like how we are to most other animals. As you may know, frogs and most amphibians can only live in humid or damp areas or near water. Humans have a bad habit of turning such areas into parking lots.
Though frogs are somewhat uniquely threatened as they tend to be pretty sensitive to pollutants. There are lots of examples I could cite of frogs being fricked by crazy chemicals, but I’m going to focus on the most humorous one even if it’s a bit outdated.
Alex Jones, the living personification of an overfilled red balloon at your racist grandpa’s 90th birthday party, famously said that
“I don’t like [the government] putting chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay!”.
-Alex Jones
You may be surprised to learn that he wasn’t just pulling that out of his ass. I mean, most of that gay bomb conspiracy is. But chemicals in the water doing what could be described as “turning frogs gay” is based on an actual published scientific paper. Though, he was only semi-correct.
The story you may have heard before, and that Alex Jones was referencing, was based on a study on the ecological effects of a herbicide known as Atrazine. (Hayes, et al, 2010). Basically, atrazine is sprayed on crops. Then after it rains the atrazine ends up in the water table as runoff, often in some river or pond. Frogs live in places like this. And the atrazine doesn’t turn them gay, it’s more turning straight male frogs into straight female frogs, but still. The transfrogs are infertile so this is pretty bad for the frog population as a lot of few remaining males end up mating with transgender frogs instead of the fertile female frogs. At least, that’s what I would tell you if that were true, which it isn’t.
Atrazine Doesn’t Actually Genderbend Frogs
Yup, turns out the whole gay frog thing is BS. When I started writing this I wanted to tell you about a zany story of some pink-pilled femboy frogs. But then I found that the original Atrazine study’s findings can’t be replicated and were likely due to improper experimental design and personal bias. (Kloas, et al, 2009) Of course, most publications of the story neglect this because feminized frogs make a good headline. But no, it seems like Atrazine is only bad for frogs for boring reasons like making them more vulnerable to disease (Koprivnikar, et al, 2007) and giving them birth defects (Lenkowski, et al, 2008).
That said, there is evidence that some frogs are having their gender changed by some sort of pollution as there is a higher concentration of intersex frogs in suburban and urban areas than in rural zones. (Skelly, et al, 2010). Some species of frogs change their gender naturally, seemingly at random. (Grafe & Linsenmair, 1989). This is likely what happened in the original Hayes Atrazine study, and the sample size was just too small for expected intersexuality variance to get averaged out.
Conclusion
There may come a day when children see Pepe and Kermit and wonder “what the heck is that? What’s a frog?”. They will have never seen a frog before because they no longer exist. The day of the froggo has passed, now is the time of man.
Honestly, hot take, amphibians as a whole have been low-tier trash since the Carboniferous when reptiles and giant bugs evolved, so this is to be expected. Frogs are kinda mid. The only high-tier frog is the invasive Cane Toad in Australia since it’s good at resisting poison and everything in Australia wastes all its evolution points on venom for no reason. As discussed in my other previous article about mammal evolution, being an invasive species in Australia isn’t very impressive. The entire continent is kind of the village bicycle at this point.
Frogs are vital keystone species in many ecosystems, also they can make you high, so we should try to save them, I guess. If I were a successful and profitable blogger I would partner with some frog conservation charity and say that some portion of the ad-revenue from this article would go to it. So I’m not gonna do that. But you should, assuming you have disposable income.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations
My unnamed college professor.
Tyrone B. Hayes, Vicky Khoury, Anne Narayan, Mariam Nazir, Andrew Park, Travis Brown, Lillian Adame, Elton Chan, Daniel Buchholz, Theresa Stueve, and Sherrie Gallipeau. Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis). PNAS. March 9, 2010 | 107 (10) 4612-4617 | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0909519107
Kloas, Werner; Lutz, Ilka; Springer, Timothy; Krueger, Henry; Wolf, Jeff; Holden, Larry; Hosmer, Alan (February 2009). “Does Atrazine Influence Larval Development and Sexual Differentiation in Xenopus laevis?”. Toxicological Sciences. 107 (2): 376–384. doi:10.1093/toxsci/kfn232. PMC 2639758. PMID 19008211. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2639758/
Koprivnikar, Janet; Forbes, Mark R.; Baker, Robert L. (2007). “Contaminant Effects on Host–Parasite Interactions: Atrazine, Frogs, and Trematodes”. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. 26 (10): 2166–70. doi:10.1897/07-220.1. PMID 17867892. S2CID 4605. https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1897/07-220.1
Lenkowski JR, Reed JM, Deininger L, McLaughlin KA (2008). “Perturbation of organogenesis by the herbicide atrazine in the amphibian Xenopus laevis”. Environ. Health Perspect. 116 (2): 223–30. doi:10.1289/ehp.10742. PMC 2235211. PMID 18288322. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235211/
Skelly, D. K., Bolden, S. R., & Dion, K. B. (2010). Intersex frogs concentrated in suburban and urban landscapes. EcoHealth, 7(3), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-010-0348-4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20862600/
Grafe, Ulmar & Linsenmair, K. Eduard. (1989). Protogynous Sex Change in the Reed Frog Hyperolius viridiflavus. In: Copeia (1989) 4, 1024-1029.. 1989. 10.2307/1445989. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27487491_Protogynous_Sex_Change_in_the_Reed_Frog_Hyperolius_viridiflavus
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