It turns out that a colony of wood frogs in Maine are more desperate for sex than we are. The 2 to 2 1/2-inch frogs that quack like ducks are in some serious trouble. You see, once they come out of hibernation, the little guys and gals have what they call "Big Night." It's their annual spring mating ritual, and it generally coincides with the first warm spring rain. But up in northern Maine, their favorite orgy pool, "Club Amphibian" is still iced over. And it gets worse.
Unlike some of us who eat too much to make up for the fact that we haven't had sex in, say, five months, wood frogs cannot eat until they've mated.
"There's a little, little bit of open water around the edges, so the animals usually hang out around the edges, waiting to get in," Aram Calhoun, a University of Maine associate professor of wetland ecology and a wetland scientist for Maine Audubon in Orono, said. "Isn't that something? That must be depressing for a cold-blooded animal. You get to the edge of the pool, and the whole bloody thing is frozen and they're probably saying, 'I told you it was too early to go.' There will be a lot of salamander divorces this time of year," she said.
Salamanders, however, apparently have many years to breed while wood frogs need to make it happen. Now. "Wood frogs are explosive breeders, yet they only live 3 to 5 years, so they only have a couple of times, if that, to breed," Calhoun said. "So, they're very anxious. Much more than the salamanders, which live 15 to 20 years."
This might explain why wood frogs are so damn horny:
Salamanders gather congress-style - they all get in the pool together - and do a little courtship dance, and no one gets hurt. With wood frogs, it's not good to be a female. "It's not uncommon for the females to drown, because she has three or four males on top of her," Calhoun said.
Wood frogs are the only frogs she knows of that attempt to mate with non-frog species.To illustrate just how crazy wood frog sex can be, Calhoun's graduate student, Kevin J. Ryan, who is working on his study site in Canterbury, Conn., photographed a wood frog trying to mate with a salamander."We've had wood frogs mating with our data loggers," Calhoun said. "The data loggers, they're in little plastic containers and they're mating with the containers. They don't care. It's just something to put your arms around. It's been a long winter, you know?"
Oh, we know. It has been a long winter.
But back to the frogs... if "Club Amphibian" doesn't thaw soon, they'll most likely move onto a new orgy pool, which, as Calhoun points out, could result in many squished frogs in the road.
Godspeed, little wood frogs!
[Sun Journal: Driven to mate, frogs on the move to orgy pools]
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