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"You take a million, billion tonnes of flaming inferno and turn it into 'twinkle, twinkle little star' ..."

Sun, 22 Feb 2009

Why did the frogs cross the road ?

While driving home from Letterfrack to Moycullen last night after a pleasant days hillwalking with the family, we saw frogs on the road. Hundreds of them. Over the course of over more than more than twenty kilometres, we saw frogs apparently crossing the road.

Can anyone tell me what was going on? It didn't look as though they were going somewhere in particular. Has they all recently spawned (unlikely) or where they looking for somewhere to spawn ? This was in the early evening: its possible that they all got to the road at dusk. That part of Connemara is all boggy hillside, with individual widely spaced houses. From up on a hill, the linear feature of the road (the N59), especially in the wet, might have been mistaken for a river. Did they head to the road to spawn?

Some species of frogs are known to gather from relatively large distances to spawn. They need at least a pond of still water to spawn, so there may not be too many suitable places for them even on a boggy hillside. They were probably heading for the most suitable pond down in the valley and the wet evening was a good weather for them to travel -- they would dry out in midday sun.

It's unlikely they would mistake the road itself for river, because they are too small to be able to orient by sight over larger distances.

Posted by Jan Hudec at Mon Feb 23 06:38:38 2009

They do this near me in suburban Edinburgh as well. When I was a kid we used to spend one night a year with buckets carrying them across the road and diverting traffic away from them.

I don't think that they would mistake our suburban road for a river, I always thought that they were on the way to a specific place to spawn but couldn't ever work out where that was. The direction they headed in was always the same but there wasn't a suitable nearby pond, unless they changed direction after crossing the road :)

Posted by Stan Tontas at Mon Feb 23 15:23:22 2009

They do that here too (Belgium). It's just that they awake after hibernation and are looking for going back to where they were born. Some people here help them to cross the roads...

stF

Posted by Stefan at Mon Mar 2 09:33:51 2009

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