> wood frogs spend the winter frozen > syrupy sugar solution prevents the cells from freezing So they don't freeze. This is click bait.
Can't tell if joking...
Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
51–60 of 145 posts
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#52Could such a mechanism be used for interstellar travel ?
Of the frogs? Sure!
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#53I really expected a wood(en) frog here, qualifying truly as a biological miracle. But the wood frogs are cool as well.
Oh god. This made me wonder, what is wood, anyway? And I've just come away much more confused. Bamboo is a grass and doesn't come from a tree. Palm wood comes from palm trees, except palm tree trunks are apparently a totally different type of structure than other tree trunks, sounds closer to Papyrus. No growth rings, a fiber type structure. Is Papyrus wood? Any plant matter above a certain density? I don't think tha…
I don't know a precise definition, but wood has many origins. Wood has evolved hundreds of separate times, including at least 38 separate times just on the Canary Islands. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341287935_Multiple_..., https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2208629119?downloa...
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#54Now I'm wondering all kinds of things about their brain. Are they capable of forming memories, and would they retain those memories after a freeze/thaw cycle? Effectively they're dead when they freeze. I'm assuming there's no brain activity.. Which means when they thaw they're being restored to life. I wonder if any other animals experience this
I would assume that just as a computer’s storage remains intact after a restart, these frogs’ brains have internal structure, synaptic connections etc that are preserved after a freeze/thaw cycle.
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#55I really expected a wood(en) frog here, qualifying truly as a biological miracle. But the wood frogs are cool as well.
Oh god. This made me wonder, what is wood, anyway? And I've just come away much more confused. Bamboo is a grass and doesn't come from a tree. Palm wood comes from palm trees, except palm tree trunks are apparently a totally different type of structure than other tree trunks, sounds closer to Papyrus. No growth rings, a fiber type structure. Is Papyrus wood? Any plant matter above a certain density? I don't think tha…
What's really going to bake your noodle later is that Corn is a grass, just like Bamboo.
My total armchair answer: It helps to think about trees as just giant shrubs.
Shrubs are considered "woody", but most definitely are not trees. There are plenty of trees which are close relatives of shrubs (like poison oak and the urushi tree).
So what's the difference between a grass and a tree? Walking the tree of life up from Poison Oak and Bamboo, we see we land at Monocotyledon and Eudicots. There's lots of non-woody and tough fibrous (i.e. woody) plans in both clades (palm trees are monocots, btw).
Wikipedia says if it is tough and fibrous and has growth rings it's wood:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood
So Bamboo, although coming from a grass and not a tree, is wood. Further reading down that page talks about density as a key quality of wood, and goes on to not definitively quality bamboo as wood or as non-wood but some are dense enough.
Ultimately, there's no super clean definition of wood is my take-away, between the technical and colloquial aspects. You can use bamboo in construction much like wood, if you cut off a bit of shrub and dry it out, it's a "stick" just as much as if you trimmed it off a tree. You can make paper out of all kinds of fibers.
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#56I really expected a wood(en) frog here, qualifying truly as a biological miracle. But the wood frogs are cool as well.
Oh god. This made me wonder, what is wood, anyway? And I've just come away much more confused. Bamboo is a grass and doesn't come from a tree. Palm wood comes from palm trees, except palm tree trunks are apparently a totally different type of structure than other tree trunks, sounds closer to Papyrus. No growth rings, a fiber type structure. Is Papyrus wood? Any plant matter above a certain density? I don't think tha…
It's best to think of it as "tree-ing" or "to tree"
A really, really fantastic article: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#57Now I'm wondering all kinds of things about their brain. Are they capable of forming memories, and would they retain those memories after a freeze/thaw cycle? Effectively they're dead when they freeze. I'm assuming there's no brain activity.. Which means when they thaw they're being restored to life. I wonder if any other animals experience this
Reading about them, it seems they migrate in winter (like half a mile uphill), but the adults always return to the same breeding pond in spring, so that information is stored somewhere.
I'm not surprised. There have been studies that show caterpillars retain memories through metamorphosis into a butterfly (a process that basically liquefies them).
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#58Aquatic turtles have another brumination (hibernation) strategy. Since they breathe air, yet may get trapped under the ice for months at at time, they lower their metabolism plus have adaptations such as scavenging some oxygen from the water via rectal tissues as well as other chemical activity involving glucose and calcium. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-secret-to-turtle-hi... https://wildlifeinwinter.com/…
That's a word I don't know (and neither do you): brumation, invented in 1965. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brumation The verb ought to be brumate. But I guess the desire to pull it into line with hibernation is strong, this happens with lots of words. (Or was the influence from "rumination"?)
Oops, thank you.
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#59Evolutionarily, amphibians are somewhat simpler than mammals, they're smaller than a lot of mammals and they don't live as long, so I suspect some of this is simply that "things that aren't there". They wouldn't have as many problems with advanced glycation end products because the temperature is so low. There's at least one other ice survival strategy: antifreeze proteins. The fir tree and a variety of arctic fish h…
I think there are threads in Michael Levin's work that suggest membrane voltage potential may be able to be 'encoded' to microtubule structures and converted back into voltage potentials later. I don't think it's firmly established or understood yet but seems like a promising area for research!
Re: Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
#60Aquatic turtles have another brumination (hibernation) strategy. Since they breathe air, yet may get trapped under the ice for months at at time, they lower their metabolism plus have adaptations such as scavenging some oxygen from the water via rectal tissues as well as other chemical activity involving glucose and calcium. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-secret-to-turtle-hi... https://wildlifeinwinter.com/…
That's a word I don't know (and neither do you): brumation, invented in 1965. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brumation The verb ought to be brumate. But I guess the desire to pull it into line with hibernation is strong, this happens with lots of words. (Or was the influence from "rumination"?)
Weirdly, I do know this word and I learned it exactly two days ago because I wanted to know the technical difference between Hibernation and Sleep in Windows 11.
So I typed in "hibern..." to Kagi and it suggested "hibernation vs brumation". I got sniped because I'd never seen the word before. So yep, I did know. And probably would have forgotten by next week if I didn't see your comment! But now I'll remember forever, thank you.