A Wood Frog’s Very Unordinary Pause

Transcript

A wood frog can freeze with no detectable heartbeat, breathing, circulation, or muscle movement, according to educational accounts. That is not an ordinary nap: those reports describe these functions stopping while the frog is frozen. Brain activity needs a careful footnote. One expert account says it has not been established whether the brain functions while frozen, though an educational account describes it activating during thawing. After thawing, the heart starts contracting again, and breathing and leg reflexes return in the accounts, though not every frog showed those responses by the study’s end. Nature’s pause button comes with a very important thaw setting. What other animal fact should we unpack?