April 15th, 2006
wood frog movie
A few of days ago, I mentioned having shot some DV footage of breeding Wood Frogs (Rana sylvatica) in 2002. This morning, I scared up the footage and made a small QT movie clip from a section of it. The clip is about 25 seconds long and approx. 905kb and has a soundtrack. I should probably provide some kind of explanation of what you’ll see if you watch the clip because, even when you’re standing right beside a pond, at the best of times it’s sometimes pretty confusing as to what’s going on.
The frogs that you’ll see floating around like a frog sandwich are a female (the larger frog in the middle) gripped by two males. Frog and toad mating is referred to as amplexus – in which the male grasps the female, and attempts to fertilize the eggs as they are released by the female. It isn’t at all uncommon to see at least two or three male Wood Frogs gripping the same female — and in fact, sometimes the numbers are far greater. In such cases, it’s not unusual for the female and even some of the males to be mortally crushed at the center of one of these group hugs. Last spring, I fished a couple of these frog-conglomerations out of the water and pulled them apart to reveal dead frogs which had been, quite literally, entirely flattened from the crushing of the pack. Anyhow, getting back to the above-mentioned movie clip — as the trio of frogs floats around, you’ll see them repeatedly torpedoed by males that are hoping to bust up the group by smashing them with their noses after swimming into them at high speed. Did I mention that breeding male Wood Frog behaviour can be rather obnoxious? :-/
Tags: Wood Frog, Rana sylvatica, amplexus