Scientists also need to work out whether the pollen is ever delivered to other flowers and if it does successfully fertilize and germinate them.

We have a lot to learn about this novel interaction.”įor instance, the mucus secreted by the frog’s skin needs to be tested to confirm it doesn’t spoil the pollen before it gets to its destination. “They are flower visitors, they are flower-visitor frogs. “We cannot say that these frogs are actually pollinators,” said Felipe Amorim, a pollination ecologist at São Paulo State University who was not involved in the research. The plethora of pollinators could push the limits of what we understand about relationships between animals and their environment.īut more observations are needed to say the frogs really are pollinating plants. In fact, recordings the team made that night show frogs also slurping on nectar from alien bearded irises.Ĭonfirming the discovery could add an amphibian to the surprisingly diverse list of recently discovered pollinators - there are pollinating rats, cockroaches and even lizards. This could also happen with other flowers of similar shapes. Toledo said, the team hypothesized that it was “actually very likely” that the species aids milk fruit tree pollination - accidentally taking pollen from flower to flower and causing reproduction - something amphibians weren’t thought to perform. “That’s completely, completely new, till now, nobody saw them actually doing that,” said Luís Felipe Toledo, head of the Amphibians Natural History Lab at the University of Campinas in Brazil and an author of a study published last month in the journal Food Webs suggesting the existence of this ecological relationship between frog and flowering tree.īecause one of the frogs surfaced from its flowery snack clad in pollen, Dr. In other words, the frogs may disperse the plant’s seeds and pollinate its flowers - which would be the first time this has been seen in an amphibian. Then they hop off, potentially transporting the pollen from their previous stop at the tropical buffet into the next milk fruit flower they encounter. When they emerge, pollen gets stuck to their heads and backs. While many frogs eat insects, the tree frog species Xenohyla truncata has a taste for the pulp of bulbous fruits and the nectar in the tree’s flowers.Īs they seek that nectar, the frogs dunk their entire bodies into the plant’s flowers, only their butts sticking out. On warm evenings near Rio de Janeiro, you might find milk fruit trees covered in brownish-orange frogs.

Guts a graphic novel