Page 3 - Coba-1

Nature

he sun has just set. It’s still quiet

down at the pond—until suddenly
a voice calls out from the reeds.
A timid honking sound pierces the
T twilight and is quickly joined by

a second even louder and more insistent voice.
They are soon drowned out by a four-voice choir,
and then the entire tree frog chorus chimes in.
There will be no peace at the pond this evening—
not until midnight at the earliest…
Why do tree frogs start their summer serenade

in the twilight hours? Because they’re searching
for love, for a princess who will make the evening
a perfect one. Night after night that hope draws
the princes of the pond out from the undergrowth

where they relax the days away hidden from view.
As strange as it may sound, frogs just can’t help
themselves. Hope springs eternal in their genes,
which program them to heed a powerful instinct:
Sing loudly enough and you’ll get what you want.

Even if it takes all summer. The mating season
begins in late March and goes all the way until
the end of August. But it takes a stroke of luck
to fi nd a pretty green princess right away—one

who’ll be able to produce hundreds of offspring.
Most frogs simply have to keep singing, often for
months on end. Frogs are indefatigable croakers,
and their persistence pays off in the long term:
Amphibians have roamed the Earth for roughly

360 million years. They were the first vertebrates
to conquer land and so have seen and survived
it all: dinosaurs, asteroid impacts, ice ages, and,
much more recently, storks, herons, and egrets.

Such birds are their worst enemies, which is why
frogs fall silent as soon as a two-legged winged
creature approaches the pond. The evolutionary
answer to avian danger is the frogs’ ability to
match their skin color to the surface on which
OF A they’re sitting—thus on leaves they turn green,

and on bark they’re brown. And if a bird happens
to spot
one anyway, frogs have powerful hind
legs that enable them to catapult themselves

through the air, more than 6 feet in one bound.
Once the bird has moved on, the little frogs in
the cattails regain their composure and resume
their singing, and soon the entire chorus joins in.
There is no opportunity for a solo performance.
Nevertheless, each of the myriad singers has his

sights fi rmly set on fi nding big love in a little pond.
So they keep singing their hearts out until they do.

ideasanddiscoveries.com 11 Nov 2018