A small frog known as the Gardiner frog native to the Seychelles islands has been found to possess a very odd trait--they use their mouths to hear!
Found by scientists to be lacking a middle ear or eardrum, it has been a mystery as to how these tiny frogs have retained the ability to croak and hear. To first determine whether these frogs could in fact hear, scientists set up audio recordings of frog songs in the Seychelles islands rain forests, and found that the frogs responded to the recordings, indicating that they could, in fact, hear. In a CBS report, Peter Cloetens of the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble stated, "As these animals are tiny, just one centimeter long, we needed x-ray images of the soft tissue and the bony parts with micrometric resolution to determine which body parts contribute to sound propagation." Recently with the use of this x-ray technology, it has been concluded that these frogs are not deaf despite the lack of an middle ear or eardrum, two features thought to be vital to hearing, and in fact use their mouths to hear.
Discovery News reports that the frogs transmit sounds through their head by first amplifying the sounds in their mouths and sending them through their abnormally thin tissue and bone in their skull to their inner ear. A truly odd feature that besides being the smallest frog on the planet, makes this frog stand out among all others.
Photo Courtesy of Live Science
