my favourite unconventional animal
with me writing this in the last days of april i am really consistent when it comes to procrastination with carnival posts. anyhow for this month's bearblog carnival hosted by sage, i present you the wackiest animal of all time: the pumpkin toadlet.
why?
i mean it doesn't look all that weird on the outside. it's just a small little frog so why is it wacky? first of all have you seen how small it actually is? like here, look at it compared to a hand.
SEE HOW SMALL THAT IS???? also you might not realise but being this small comes with a lot of sacrifice, mostly in relation to how underdeveloped their inner ears are.
so just how underdeveloped are their ears?
look at this gif of it jumping. it can jump alright but the landing? uhh not so much. it doesn't have the best semicircular canals to know just how it's moving in the air so it just jumps and hopes for the best. which usually means jumping and flopping about. it looks really goofy.
ears are supposed to hear
one critical function of the ear is the ability to hear (wow, astonishing) and with just how small their ears are this ability is also lacking so much so that they can't hear their own species mating calls. they just go off of the visual cues like vocal sac inflation, hand waving and mouth opening.
did i mention, poison?
yeah they are also highly poisonous. that's why they are able to get away with having not fully functioning systems. when we talk about an animal there are 3 major things that it needs to do in order to survive:
- eat
- move around
- mate
in this animal 2 of those 3 major functions are impaired. make of that what you will.