The Courtship of Vladimer The Frog

According to Bell, males of species that engage in terrestrial reproduction are more likely to help guard the eggs and young. The females are also more likely to emerge unscathed from mating in terrestrial scenarios versus aquatic environments with a lot of other males around. So she's losing energy and potentially getting smothered in a huge breeding mass.

Bell's data and previous studies have found that frog species in tropical areas are more likely to be terrestrial breeders versus frogs outside of the tropics. While the study does not determine for certain why this is, she has a theory. Bell and her colleagues also found that males of terrestrial-breeding species tend to have smaller testes, which produce less sperm than those of non-terrestrial breeders. It is possible that in long run it could be dangerous for a frog to depend on things like a particular plant to provide breeding structure.

However, the scope of the study did not include investigating potential drawbacks to terrestrial breeding. Bell comes to Smithsonian from Cornell University, where she received her Ph. The very first place where I did field work was Australia as an undergraduate student. That was the solidifying moment. Bell is looking forward to working with both the material and human resources available at Smithsonian.

And the people for sure The depth and breadth of expertise that's here. The types of questions that we are contributing to here. When we combine our expertise, it's amazing, the kind of work we can do jointly. As Smithsonian's new curator overseeing frogs, Bell will be focusing on a group of animals that is facing rapid extinctions around the world. If you don't know what kind of habitat they need, you don't have any hope. That is going to be an important place to be. No water infiltrates these chambers, much less plant roots or modern rodents.

This closed world provided shelter, a continuous chill, and an effectively dry environment, that allowed the fruits to persist. At subzero temperatures, their chemical reactions slowed to a crawl. Extreme age was no longer a problem. The underground rocks contain naturally radioactive elements, which would have bombarded the seeds with low but accumulating doses of radiation. It is home to bacteria, algae, fungi, plants and more. In the fossil burrows that Yashina has studied, scientists have found up to , to , seeds in individual chambers. But nature has already produced similar frozen seed banks.

Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon could act as one massive freezer, where ancient life has been stored, waiting to greet the world again.

The lead author, David Gilichinsky passed away on 18 February , just two days before his final paper was published. Regeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,y-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost. The 13,year old tree that survives by cloning itself. Is there any evidence for viruses or other plant parasites surviving this sort of time travel? Could the melting permafrost in North America release more than methane? Incidentally, I recognized the family of the plant and thought it looked like one of the Silene species pats himself on the back.

Matt—yes, the melting permafrost will and is releasing methane. Decomposing organisms produce methane. Thaw out frozen plant material and it will begin to rot and produce methane. After all, the samples which provided us with definitive knowledge of the flu came from corpses exhumed from the Alaskan permafrost. My other question would be, given how much permafrost around the world is currently melting, are there any expeditions to try to find what is in it before it all rots?

Smithsonian’s new curator of frogs explains why some frogs seek privacy when they mate

It was Scrat who buried the fruit! The paper will appear at some point this week. Keep an eye on:. This is just an ancient and subtly different version of it. The proverb, Pride goeth before a fall, seems particularly apt in this case. Was that just too long for you to get through? Was the amount of radiation absorbed actually measured or simply calculated from the age and the characteristics of the surrounding soil?

I remember having a gradeschool teacher read my class a picture book about the seeds buried by the lemmings, which tied a message of hope to the fact that the ancient seeds found by the canadian team were still viable as plants. The plants and the existing ecosystem interact and then all human life is gone. I really appreciate the hard work these scientists do to unlock the mysteries of evolution; to reveal what our environment was like in less than a blink of an eye in the geological time scale.

Some versions end with a cat, snake or other creature devouring the couple and wedding guests.

Sometimes Frog gets away, but is later swallowed by a duck. See " Frog Went a-Courting " at Wikisource for one version of the lyrics. Usually, the final verse states that there's a piece of food on the shelf, and that if the listener wants to hear more verses, they have to sing it themselves.

The notes on this song in Cazden et al. If the second known version , in Melismata, also reprinted in Chappell were the oldest, this might be possible — there are seeming political references to "Gib, our cat" and "Dick, our Drake. If it refers to any queen at all, it would seemingly have to be Mary Stuart.

Wells, however, in the liner notes to the LP Brave Boys; New England traditions in folk music New World Records , , suggests that the original may have been satirically altered in when it was recorded in the register of the London Company of Stationers, as this would have been at the height of the unpopular courtship.

The song resurfaced a few years later, with changes, when another French frog wooing caused concern—that of the Duke of Anjou and Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth even nicknamed Anjou, her favorite suitor, "the frog". Another theory traces the song to Suffolk: The song has been heard by many people as "Froggie Went a-Courtin ' " in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Pecos Pest , which uses a version arranged and performed by Shug Fisher , in character as "Uncle Pecos. It is an improvised version with many lyrics that are unintelligible, and many changed.

For example, he stutters and gives up when he tries to say " hickory tree" and says "way down yonder by the