The smallest frog in the world is so small that it cannot jump

Clubheads has to watch in politics all year round. Now you can see them again in nature. The spawning season for frogs has just started and the crunching is intense. Tadpoles hatch towards the summer, which soon mature into little frogs.

The frog’s metamorphosis is miraculous, like the rise of life to earth in miniature size in evolution. A fish-like tadpole that breathes with gills develops into a creature that breathes with lungs and crawls on land.

In the tropics many frog species remain very small. So small that they are almost indistinguishable from an insect.

The handsome guy on top of the coin in the picture is 7.7 millimeters tall and fully grown. It represents the average size of its species. The creature was found from New Guinea in 2009 and was named Paedophryne amauensis.

It was the smallest frog in the world for a long time, until from Brazil found an even smaller one.

Determining the smallness records of frogs requires quite a bit of patience from researchers when they have to measure hundredths of a millimeter. The world’s smallest known frog is now only 6.45 millimeters long Brachycephalus pulex. 6.45 milliliters!

It is as small as a dried pea. At the same time, it is the smallest vertebrate animal in the world. The frog is already so small that it doesn’t even work anymore.

Minisammakko can’t jump properly, because its sense of balance doesn’t work in the air.

Frogs and we humans sense our own position with the help of fluid flowing in the passages of the balance organ of the inner ear. In the mini frog’s ear, these passages are so small that the liquid does not really flow.

When the mini-frog pops into the air, it freezes in mid-flight and spins like a stick in the air until it falls to the ground as it hurts. Sad performance.

The researchers reasoned that vertebrates smaller than this cannot even exist, because the body still requires its own space.

An entire genus of mini frogs was also found in Madagascar in 2019. The researcher gave the three species playful names that refer to their small size: Mini mum, Mini ature and Mini tools.