TheBanyanTree: Dried frogs

[Peter Macinnis]

We were discussing dried frog pills, a Person Who Shall Remain Nameless 
and I. If you don't get the reference, you have never been a bursar. 
Which is probably good.  Anyhow, the PWSRN made a slighting reference to 
me, leaping over the roof tops in pursuit of dried frogs.

I choose to respond here.

Dried frogs are good, and they are also educational, even beyond the 
Unseen University.  When I was doing final-year zoology, we used green 
tree frogs a lot in physiology studies, and there was always a big tank 
of them at the back of the lab in a closed-off room. The door was kept 
closed because there were always a few frogs on the loose.  Tree frogs 
can climb (der!) and leap. Sometimes one would make it out the door, 
which enlivened proceedings no end.

Somehow, I somehow got a reputation in the class as a good animal 
handler, and a lot of the more nervous of my fellow students used to ask 
me to show them how to pick up mice, rats, lizards--and frogs.

Green tree frogs produce copious urine, and void their bladder when 
picked up -- it's a good defence mechanism, if you think about what the 
average predator gets a mouth full of. The ones on the loose, outside 
the tank had resorbed the urine and were a darker colour as well as 
being shrivelled and unhealthy looking.  Desiccated and dried, they were.

The devil must have made me do it.  I always picked up any dried escapee 
frogs and put them back in the tank. Then I let my colleagues take a 
plump and well-filled hydrated frog from the tank.

Yes, of course I apologised.  And they WERE wearing lab coats.

Or they should have been.

Hey, it was educational!

And they never did have to learn the hard way about what a stressed 
Cunningham's Skink may do.  For that noble humanitarian sacrifice, I 
guess I will never make the record books for extreme education.

peter



-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis            petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Cross-cultural watercraft maker, polymorphic monohulls
  \.--._*   and Delphic coracles a specialty, also Tribo-economics
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm