Suddenly looking dead, grunting like a guy or vigorously rotating can help female frogs survive mating balls in species with aggressively grabby males.
Grab fast and hang on for hours. A fierce grip is all the courtship finesse a male frog needs in species that reproduce in frenzied mobs.of escaping overbearing male grasps, say evolutionary behavioral ecologist Carolin Dittrich and curator of herpetology Mark-Oliver Rödel of the Berlin Natural History Museum. The pair describe those tactics October 11 infrogs gathering at a natural pool, “it can look quite like a mess,” says Dittrich, now at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
Dittrich started wondering about female defenses during an “Oh no!” moment when reviewing video she had captured of European common frogs mating in a lab setup. She had wanted to see if the males show any size preference in the females they target. In the mating videos, however, Dittrich noticed something more interesting.
The male in that video had clasped a large female, clearly alive, who then apparently died in his embrace. Her legs stretched out in dead-frog abandon. He let go and pursued the other female in the box. After about two minutes, however, the “dead” female revived and started moving again. Dittrich now proposes that looking dead — or the term she prefers, “tonic immobility” — could let a female escape a male’s grasp.
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