As the Director of Content of LittleThings.com, I start my days at 6 a.m. with a cup of coffee and a poorly behaved pug in my lap, resetting the homepage of our website with the most important stories of the day. I also generally scroll through Facebook and Twitter to see if there's anything our writers should be covering right away.
This morning, a photograph of a frog, frozen solid, stopped me dead in my feed.
"During cold winters, the Alaskan Wood Frog becomes a frog-shaped block of ice. It stops breathing, and its heart stops beating. When spring arrives, the frog thaws and returns to normal going along its merry way," a site called ScienceDump wrote.
Wait — what?! That defies everything that I learned in biology class. Naturally, I wanted to share this story immediately on our pages, but then common sense got the better of me and I realized it would be wise to check whether or not it was fact or fiction.
You can't believe everything you read, but the truth about the Alaskan Tree Frog is way stranger than fiction…
This is the post as it appeared on my newsfeed:
The first thing you should do when you're trying to debunk a rumor is to check out the comments on a post, particularly if it's viral. This zombie tree frog had been shared over 400,000 times, so I knew that another web sleuth had likely investigated the matter. Sure enough…
Chris McGugin and Mary Rehberg are definitely onto something. Next, I used Google to investigate. Turns out, the rumor that the Alaskan Tree Frog could freeze solid was only kind of true. Well, 2/3 true to be precise.
At this juncture, I have to point out that our buddy Chris is 100 percent right. The photo in the original post is not an Alaskan Tree Frog. (There's actually no such thing as an Alaskan Tree Frog — more on that later.) It's probably a lawn ornament. The photo above depicts a wood frog, and Alaskan wood frogs DO, in fact, freeze. According to the LA Times, "They do not freeze totally solid, but they do freeze mostly solid. Two-thirds of their body water turns to ice. If you picked them up, they would not move. If you bent one of their legs, it would break."
Wikipedia confirms: "Frogs can survive many freeze/thaw events during winter if no more than about 65 percent of the total body water freezes."
Watch the curious Alaskan wood frog thaw out and come "back to life" in the video below. While the Facebook post I saw this morning turned out to be a lie, I learned that the truth was actually stranger than fiction. Don't forget to SHARE this curious creature with all of your friends!
