Avoiding Male Attention
Male frogs commonly coerce female frogs into mating, but some females have come up with ways to avoid harassment – including playing dead.
Short Mating Window
Many frog species, including the European common frog (Rana temporaria), only have a short window of a few weeks each year to mate. This results in intense competition among males for the attention of females, sometimes leading to fatal clashes.
New Discoveries
Carolin Dittrich and her colleagues from the Natural History Museum in Berlin have found that female common frogs employ different tactics to evade males.
The Study
The team collected 96 female and 48 male common frogs during the breeding season. One male and two differently sized females were placed in a box filled with water, and their behavior was recorded for an hour.
Escape Tactics
Of the female frogs that were embraced by a male as part of the mating process, 83% rotated away, making it the most common escape tactic. 48% of females used a release call, mimicking the call that males use to signal other males that they are males. 33% of clasped females exhibited “tonic immobility,” or playing dead.
Successful Evasion
46% of the females were able to evade the male’s attention, with smaller females having a higher success rate due to their ability to escape from a male’s grip more easily.
Relevance to the Wild
Although this study was conducted in a lab, Dittrich believes that female frogs would exhibit similar behavior in the wild. This challenges the notion that females are helpless and reveals that they are not as passive as previously thought.
