- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?
- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?
- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
I crave a one-hour documentary about this.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_rabbit_died
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test
The frog was an improvement since you didn't have to kill the frog (apparently they could survive the urine injection).
FWIW the rabbit always died whether you were pregnant or not :(.
This shows up in the Aerosmith song, "Sweet Emotion"
That made zero sense to me at the time.
Yeah, it makes me think of how many dumb things scientists really did. I bet, that the most of them are unknown because nothing interesting happened.
In the 1930s, two South African researchers, Hillel Shapiro and Harry Zwarenstein,[26] students of Lancelot Hogben at the University of Cape Town, discovered that the urine from pregnant women would induce oocyte production in X. laevis within 8–12 hours of injection.
-- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_clawed_frog#Use_in_res...
The reaction is to Human chorionic gonadotropi - basically it's a marker which tells a human's body "You are pregnant, proceed accordingly". If you've got a womb and are in a reasonable age range this almost certainly means you're pregnant, if not it's a sign something went badly wrong. So, testing whether this marker is present means you know months earlier than you might otherwise.
Presumably the frog "Make eggs now" marker is different, but not different enough to ensure this effect doesn't happen, after all ordinarily frogs wouldn't be exposed to the urine of pregnant humans.
> Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
This isn't a rare species. It just wasn't in Wales and now it once again isn't in Wales. So that's like how Wales also does not have kangaroos. No danger the kangaroo goes extinct, there are lots and they're pretty competitive. But there aren't any in Wales (outside maybe a Zoo?) and so the ecosystem there does not have a kangaroo shaped niche.
temp0826•1h ago
tomrod•1h ago
tialaramex•1h ago