Perfect camouflage – Tropical frogs use this trick to make themselves invisible – Knowledge




Perfect camouflage – With this trick, tropical frogs make themselves invisible – Knowledge – SRF
























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Legend:

Can you spot the frogs?

Jesse Delia

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A magic trick that even Harry Potter would be jealous of! How glass frogs use their sophisticated camouflage technique to make themselves practically completely invisible has now been published in the specialist magazine “Science» described.

The tropical frogs are nocturnal, sleeping on translucent leaves during the day. During sleep almost all red blood cells collect in the liver and are protected from light there. This makes glass frogs two to three times more transparent than they already are when awake.

Two glass frogs are shown in the picture.

Legend:

Jesse Delia

As soon as night falls and the glass frogs become active, the oxygen-rich blood cells flow through the veins again. The blood and circulatory system become visible again.

Trick could one day also help sick people

But it remains a mystery how the glass frogs get so many blood cells into the liver and back into the circulatory system within seconds without blood clots forming or tissue damage. If questions about this mechanism can be clarified, it could also help people who are affected by vascular diseases.

Challenging: Frogs need to sleep peacefully


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Only when the glass frogs are asleep do they actually become transparent. When the frogs are stressed, active, or stunned, they don’t use their camouflage technique. Therefore, the research team had to choose a method that is quiet and disturbs the frogs as little as possible. They used something called photoacoustic microscopy, which uses light to detect the sound wave propagation of red blood cells. This enabled the research team to create detailed biomedical images without injecting the sleeping frogs with a contrast agent or even subjecting them to surgical procedures.



  1. knowledge

  2. Nature & Animals

  3. Current article



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