Frogs and other amphibians lay eggs, however, mammals give birth to live juvenile, isn’t that so? Not generally. A recently depicted frog species give birth to live tadpoles, and is the only known frog to do so, analysts say.
The revelation happened one night the previous summer, when analyst Jim Mcguire was tromping through the rainforest in Sulawesi, an Indonesian island east of Borneo. Mcguire unearthed what resembled like a single male frog. However, when he contacted to snatch it, he ended up holding substantially more, said Mcguire, a herpetologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“When I lifted her up, she squirted tadpoles on my hand,” Mcguire told Live Science. He didn’t have sufficient time to snap a video of the frog giving birth, however did find more tadpoles in close-by pools. The find “was clear evidence” that the females do indeed give birth to live tadpoles, he said.
The frogs were parts of a group of Asian fanged frogs that were found a few decades back by Mcguire’s associate Djoko Iskandar, a zoologist at Indonesia’s Institute Teknologi Bandung, however, the species had not yet been reported in a scientific paper, Mcguire said.
Iskandar had suspected such frogs may gave birth to live juvenile as opposed to laying eggs, yet researchers had never watched the creature mating or birthing tadpoles until Mcguire’s find.
Mcguire and his associates named the species he discovered Limnonectes larvaepartus, and depict it in a study published Wednesday, 31st Dec, in the PLOS ONE journal.
Frogs reproduce in several ways, the analysts said. In many species, the process of fertilization happens outside of the female’s body: the female lays eggs and the male then lays sperm on top of them. However, in around dozen species, the male frogs fertilize the eggs inside the female’s body.
For a large portion of these frogs, the procedure isn’t well-caught on. However, for two species of “tailed” frogs, the males have evolved a penis-like organ called the tail, which transmits sperm to the female. The female tailed frogs then lay their fertilized eggs underneath rocks in streams. Various other frogs that have inner fertilization give birth to small frogs, or “froglets.”
However, L. larvaepartus is the only species recognized to give birth to live tadpoles, the specialists said.
