Frogs keep mating with the wrong things...
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Two years ago, Juan Díaz Ricaurte was hiking through the mountains of Brazil when a male yellow cururu toad affixed itself to his boot. Díaz Ricaurte gently detached the frog and set it back on the ground, several feet away; undeterred, it bounded back over and wrapped its arms around the shoe again. “It was super focused on grabbing Juan’s boot,” says Filipe Serrano, Díaz Ricaurte’s fellow biologist, who witnessed the meet-cute. The frog seemed to have mistaken Díaz Ricaurte’s footwear “for a potential mate,” and kept returning to clasp it anew. The little Lothario, Serrano said, “would not let it go.”
Neither, in a sense, could Serrano or Díaz Ricaurte. The toad-boot tryst eventually ended, but in the months that followed, the two University of São Paulo researchers could not get the incident out of their heads. It wasn’t the toad, exactly, or the boot, or even the doomed union between the two—frog mating, known as amplexus, usually involves a male latching on to a female, and it’s not uncommon for overeager suitors to initiate an erroneous embrace. What stayed with the pair, they told me, was the possibility that these ill-fated events, which they’d both heard about before, might be growing in frequency, as frogs attempt to navigate a more and more fractured world. Scientists call this an evolutionary trap. “The environment changes, and they make more mistakes,” says Ulrika Candolin, a biologist at the University of Helsinki. Temperatures are rising; habitats are fraying; animals are being forced to mingle with new and unfamiliar species. Sex, for some species, seems bound to take a hit.
Serrano and Díaz Ricaurte, along with their colleague Marcio Martins, began to search for past accounts of frog hugs gone awry—formally termed misdirected amplexus. They found nearly 400, a whole coterie of frogs glomming on to things that they almost certainly could never fertilize: dead frogs, incompatible species of frogs, and frog embryos still inside of eggs; coconuts, mangos, and apples; geckos, turtles, fish, and slugs; balls, rulers, and plastic cups; and even some cow and yak dung. The compendium makes clear that randy frogs can sometimes find themselves seriously duped.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...plexus/629885/