Researchers have discovered that certain frogs employ a unique strategy to avoid unwanted male attention – they fake their own death.
This revelation provides new insights into the behaviour of the European common frog, challenging the notion that females merely endure male competition for mates, often resulting in fatal situations where multiple males cling to a single female.
Dr. Carolin Dittrich, the lead author from the Natural History Museum of Berlin, explained that previous beliefs suggested females were unable to choose or defend themselves against male coercion. However, the study challenges this assumption, revealing that females in dense breeding aggregations are not passive participants.
In their study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers placed each male frog in a box with two females of different sizes and recorded mating behaviour.
Results from 54 females experiencing male clutches showed that 83% of them attempted to rotate their bodies. Additionally, 48% emitted release calls while rotating, and 33% exhibited tonic immobility – a pose resembling playing dead.
The researchers propose that tonic immobility may be a stress response, more common in smaller, younger females due to increased stress with less reproductive experience. These tactics, observed more frequently in smaller females, allowed some to escape male clutches, demonstrating mate avoidance behaviours and resulting in the escape of 25 females.
While acknowledging the study’s limitations, including the need for a larger sample size, the researchers suggest that these behaviours may serve multiple purposes, such as testing the male’s strength and endurance.
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