Monday, September 30, 2013

Metamorphasis

When frogs are born, they aren't exactly frogs. They begin their lives as these little guys called tadpoles! They've got tails, which disappear as they progress through life. When the tadpole stage is completed - little limbs have begun to form - the tadpoles become froglets. Tadpoles lose about a quarter of their weight during this transformation. At 10 to 13 weeks, shortly before the froglet leaves the water in which they have developed, their tail has completely disappeared through the process of apoptosis and their forelegs emerge. This is when the lungs have developed and they lose their gills. After this stage, the froglets become adult frogs and live happily ever after eating bugs and such!



Innuendo Free Zone

Let's get straight to the point here:  reproduction. Male frogs have testes, and female frogs have ovaries and oviducts. The testes are a yellow-ish colour and are attached to the kidneys. The testes produce sperm which travel to the cloaca.  The ovaries produce eggs which move through the coiled, white oviducts to the cloaca. The cloaca can be considered a reproductive organ because it is a sac where urine, feces, sperm and eggs are collected and passed.


It's not all about the flies

The digestive system starts with the mouth. A frog sees something that looks tasty and snatches it to eat. Usually frogs eat insects, other frogs, or small mammals. They also have teeny teeth, that are used to grind food before the food is eaten. The food then moves through the esophagus into the stomach. It then is passed to the small intestine where most digestion occurs. Frogs carry pancreatic juice from the pancreas and bile - which is produced in the liver - through the gall bladder from the liver to the small intestine, where said fluids digest the food and extract nutrients. The food then passes into the large intestine where water is extracted and all wastes exit through the cloaca.

Can we blacklist this? Blood.

If you don't like blood, this post isn't for you. Trust me, I wish I didn't have to write this, because I can't stand even talking about blood.

The frogs' circulatory system has a heart, blood vessels, and blood. The heart has three chambers that have two auricles and one ventricle. There is a mixing of the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood in the ventricle. The blood vessels are arteries, veins, and capillaries. Arteries carry blood away from the heart two different parts of the body, whereas veins carry blood to the heart from different parts of the body. 


Breathing - not in the human sense

Frogs have lungs, like humans, but they don't usually breath like humans. Most frogs breathe through their skin - which is why the skin needs to stay moist and such. The frogs respiratory system consists of a pair of lungs, a pair of bronchi, and a trachea. The lungs have a large amount of microscopic functional units called alveoli.

Ugh, Bones


There are two different types of skeleton:  the exoskeleton, which is the stable outer shell of an organism, and the endoskeleton, which forms the support structure inside the body. The frogs skeletal system  forms the internal supporting framework for the body. It can be distinguished into an axial skeleton and an appendicular skeleton. Axial skeleton consists of skull, vertebrae and sternum. Appendicular skeleton consists of the girdles -pectoral and pelvic- and the limb bones.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Basically skin

If you're somewhat intelligent, you may know what the word "Integument" means. If not, that's okay! It just means skin or what naturally covers an animal, like fur. Frogs have moist thin skin for respiration and protection. Most of them need to stay moist or they could suffocate. This is why they have mucus glands! Another reasons frogs are gross. Basically, mucus is excreted to keep the skin moist whilst they are in air for gas exchange. That's why Benjamin looked slimy. Some frogs have bad tasting skin, and others are poisonous to keep predators from eating them.