This is a suspicious start to my blogquest, since I don’t like frogs. They’re slimy. They claim to taste like chicken. They’re clammy. They croak. In short, I think they’re disgusting.
It doesn’t really matter to me that scientists find them fascinating and helpful to mankind. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for the frogs and their lumpy cousins, the toads; there exist people who actually love them enough to poke at them with magnifying glasses and biology know-how in tow. It’s just that, for the sake of world peace, I don’t want them crossing that half-meter-radius force field surrounding my body. Otherwise, I proclaim war against all amphibians.
Anyway, now that I’m through being a girl, I found this fascinating piece of information in Yahoo. I wager about a million of us clicked that interesting thumbnail in the Yahoo homepage’s Features section when it appeared. Since the picture they showed us of the glass frog is a bit small, I present to you a few images designed to make you squeal in freaked-out delight:
Taken from a paper on taxonomy, natural history and conservation status by Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia and Roy W. McDiarmid for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
A "pregnant" female frog, image taken from the National Geographic Society
I don’t want frogs to take up most of my precious 3Gb WordPress space, so two images is all I can give you. I hope you were happily grossed out.
No, I didn’t post this so we could all be grossed out at glass frogs. In fact, I am personally fascinated by this animal’s existence. (Beware, I’m tossing out another well-used phrase.) This see-through frog is yet another proof that truth is stranger than fiction.
People have always been more complicated that any of the characters our greatest writers can conjure. Nature has yet to stop surprising us with glow-in-the-dark mushrooms, two-headed snakes, inflate-a-face seals, and eyes-that-spit-blood lizards.
The universe continues to laugh at our feeble human minds: a considerable number of Physics and Mathematics brains argue that theoretically, “nothingness” is possible beyond the universe, beyond the borders of time and space. Non-time and non-space exist.
So, what am I trying to get at? Nothing, really, but a mere fascination at the fact that reality has that capacity to outstretch the reaches of human imagination. I can hear Truth snickering, albeit affectionately, at the mortals who continuously strive to know Her.
Glass frogs. What the hell. I’m stumped, bowled-over, and fascinated.
What next?
