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An animal with a “Super Power”
Interesting creature…
Kaieteur News – We live in a world where human beings, especially children fantasize about having superpowers, but in the animal kingdom, there some creatures that might possess such extraordinary capabilities.
The glass frog
This photo provided by researchers in December 2022 shows a male glass frog photographed from below using a flash, showing its transparency. Scientists measured muscle and ventral skin, finding that these tissues transmit over 90% of visible light and are yet perfectly functional. Some frogs found in South and Central America have the rare ability to turn on and off their nearly transparent appearance, researchers report Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022, in the journal Science. (Jesse Delia/AMNH via AP)
This week’s interesting creature, the Glass Frog, is one such animal that can almost turn itself invisible, through the use of its transparent skin. A Glass Frog is about the size of a marshmallow and belongs to the amphibian family, Centrolenidan but got its common name because you can see straight through them.
Part of the skin on its stomach, according to scientists, is so transparent that you can see clearly all of its internal organs but the Glass Frog has found a way to use the transparency to its advantage and that is by turning invisible.
Glass Frogs can sit on a leaf and a predator won’t even know it is there because the transparent skin allows it to blend in. The colour of the leaf is reflected through the frog’s transparent skin and it becomes the leaf.
Scientists were not aware of this when the Glass Frog was first discovered in the South American country of Ecuador. They believed too that the frog’s skin was naturally transparent but recent studies in 2022 have revealed otherwise.
In a BBC article published in December last, two scientists discovered that the frog was actually making itself “see through” via a unique capability it possesses.
According to the article, Glass Frogs are able to make 61 percent of its body transparent to escape the attention of predators and do this by pooling all of its blood without being negatively affected by clots.
“They somehow pack most of the red blood cells in the liver, so they’re removed from the blood plasma. They’re still circulating plasma… but they do it somehow without triggering a massive clot,” one of the scientists identified as Mr. Delia explained.
Up to 89% of the animal’s blood cells become packed together, almost doubling the size of the liver, and allowing the frog to become transparent.
At night, when the creature wants to become active again by hunting or mating, it releases the red blood cells back into circulation and the liver shrinks back again.
The second scientist, Carlos Toboado noted that the frogs are still able to make itself transparent even if it is injured and described its capability as a “superpower”.
“This ability to selectively pool and clot blood is the creature’s “superpower””, Dr. Toboada reportedly said.
In most animals, pooling blood together leads to clotting which can be life-threatening, for example leading to heart attacks in humans but the Glass Frog has been a master of this for possibly million of years.
Source of information: (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64069630), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_frog)
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