Hiding Their Blood is Glass Frog's Secret for Transparency
Booga1 writes:
Science magazine reports: Glass frogs become see-through by hiding their blood.
They're called glass frogs for a reason. Flip the paperclip-size amphibians over, and you'll see their bones, innards, and beating heart through a translucent belly.
Now, scientists have figured out how some of these tiny frogs, which reside in tropical forests throughout Central and South America, keep their skin so clear-they divert their blood into their livers to help them disappear.
[...] At night, when the amphibians breed and feed, they're opaque. But during the day, when they snooze on leaves, most of their bodies, save for the lime green hue of their backs, turn transparent. This helps the frogs blend in like drops of dew, keeping them safe from spiders and snakes while they rest.
The scientists brought a few of the frogs back to the lab and monitored how their transparency shifted as they slept, exercised, chirped, or were under anesthesia. Sleeping glass frogs were between 34% and 61% more transparent than when they were active, the team reports today in Science.
[...]
During the day, blood vessels in the frogs' livers were brimming with red blood cells, swelling the size of the organ by about 40%. Compared with other tree frogs, which can only store about 12% of their red blood cells in their livers, glass frogs can store a whopping 89%-nearly all of the red blood cells in their body.
How the animals survive this extreme adaptation is unclear, says study co-author Jesse Delia, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "They're basically not transporting very much oxygen for 12 hours a day."
Another mystery is how glass frogs are able to move so many blood cells into one place without creating a potentially fatal clot. Solving that could lead to better blood clot treatments for humans, says Richard White, an oncologist at the University of Oxford who has studied the spread of cancer and other diseases in translucent zebrafish but was not involved with the new study. "This seemingly basic observation about glass frogs leads to very clear implications for human health."
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