Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Answering those questions that make you go... Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Rosie DuPont. I'm on a road trip going to visit some friends, but I'm stuck in traffic and I'm so hungry.
I ate all my emergency peanuts. I skipped lunch and it's almost dinner time. I just want to get there already so I can eat. I can't believe the people in the car next to me are eating chips. And their windows are down? I can practically hear them crunching. I wish I had a really, really long sticky tongue that could shoot out, wrap around that bag of chips, and then snap back to me. Like an extra long superhero frog tongue. Then the chips would be mine. Wow!
Huh. How do frog tongues work? I bet someone has looked into this. Hi, I'm Lily from Washington State, and my question is, how do frog tongues stretch so far? My name is Kisa Nishikawa, and I'm a professor at Northern Arizona University. We did a lot of work making actually high-speed movies. I think we looked at
probably over 120 different species of frogs from all over the world. So we learned a lot about how different frogs catch bugs and the different biomechanics of their mouths and tongues and how that allows them to move really, really fast to catch a bug.
The only real benefit that we could find from field studies looking at how these frogs catch bugs with different types of tongues was really that they could catch bugs at some distance from their mouth without having to jump with their whole bodies to catch them so that they would be less noticeable to the predators in that environment.
Frogs have pretty long tongues, much longer, for example, than our tongues, but they are by no means the record holders. Chameleons have the longest tongues, and their tongues can be like twice the length of their bodies, which is pretty scary when you think about it.
I think the longest frog tongues are probably on the order of about a third of the body length, a third to half of the body length. And of course, frogs compared to salamanders and chameleons have sort of short little bodies that they aren't as elongated as those other animals either. Um, uh,
Wow. Okay. Not only are frog tongues long, they're made out of the softest biological material in the world. They're like as soft as your brain.
No offense. Anyway, froggy tongues are also covered in incredible spit that can be both a liquid and a solid. Yes, when the tongue shoots out and slaps around its prey, the saliva is liquid. But as the tongue retracts back into the frog's mouth, the saliva hardens so its snack can't escape.
Once the food is safe inside the frog's mouth, the saliva turns to liquid again and the frog dips its eyeballs into its mouth to scrape the meal off its tongue and down its throat. Can you imagine your eyeballs scraping food down your throat? Whoa, no thanks. Not so sure I want those chips after all. I'll just wait till I get to my friend's house. Ooh, the traffic is moving.
If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to learn more about human tongues, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode called Tongue Twisters. Terribly terrific and truly tantalizing. If you have a moment of um question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then. I'm Tom Cooke.
I'm Ben. I'm Ben.