Animals that Start with E - Listed With Pictures, Facts

Baby Frogs

Baby Frogs are cute curious creatures and love to hop, crawl & jump around but there is danger to them everywhere. Your job is to keep each frog safe, where you can see them and from dangers of hungry fish, attacks from birds of prey and just getting stuck in mud. These and many more dangers can take your baby frogs from you. Dragonflies can distract you from your task. Rocks and cattails can steer your frogs into trouble. There are 30 different frogs to discover and more to come. Collect them all!

Frogs Are Screaming But We Can't Hear Them

The rainforest can be a noisy place to be, so how do you make yourself heard if you end up in trouble? For the clay robber frog, the answer is to give off an almighty scream – but it's one that we humans can't naturally hear. However, a team of scientists have now successfully recorded it for the first time.

The use of ultrasound is common in the animal world for communication and echolocation – bats, dolphins, and whales are all known to use it. Frogs can use ultrasound to chatter too, though some researchers suspected that they might employ it to make distress calls as well. 

Now, the screams of the clay robber frog (Haddadus binotatus), a species endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest, have helped to confirm this theory.

To do so, the team had to get the frogs into defense mode. This involved holding the frogs by their back legs, a tried and tested method for simulating an attack by a predator. In response, the frogs raise up the front of their bodies, jerk their heads back and open their mouths wide almost as if preparing themselves, and then partially close their mouths.

Does this remind anyone else of the "Pop Cat" meme?

Image courtesy of Ubiratã Ferreira Souza, illustration by Lucas Rosado

As recordings revealed on two occasions, this slight closing of the mouth coincided with a high-frequency distress call. Though parts of the calls were between 7 to 20 kilohertz, a frequency that humans can hear, there were also components that went above 20kHz and up to 44 kHz – that's ultrasound territory, which humans can't hear.

The defensive positioning of the frogs suggests that the distress call also has a defensive purpose, but exactly how the call is meant to ward off predators is unclear. One possibility is that it scares a whole host of different predatory animals away.

"Some potential predators of amphibians, such as bats, rodents and small primates, are able to emit and hear sounds at this frequency, which humans can't," said first author Ubiratã Ferreira Souza in a statement. 

"One of our hypotheses is that the distress call is addressed to some of these, but it could also be the case that the broad frequency band is generalist in the sense that it's supposed to scare as many predators as possible."

But screaming their heads off to scare away predators is just one theory. It might also be a call out to the predators of their predators, the researchers suggest.

"Could it be the case that the call is meant to attract an owl that will attack a snake that's about to eat the frog?" Souza hypothesized.

It's a question that the team hopes to answer with future research, which they also hope will determine whether there are other species of frogs silently screaming too.

The study is published in the journal acta ethologica.

Small, But Mighty: How Cuteness Has Taken Over The World

Cute things are everywhere, not just online. In Japan—where appreciation for all things kawaii is especially keen—roadblocks come in the form of dolphins, ducks or frogs. Hello Kitty, a cartoon, adorns everything from phone chargers to first-aid kits. In America a puppy has advertised beer, and an endearing gecko helps GEICO sell around $39bn in car insurance a year. In Britain a cartoon koala helps peddle toilet paper.

An interest in the adorable has long been derided as girlish and frivolous. But cuteness has recently become a subject of serious inquiry, inspiring scientific research, academic literature—dubbed "Cute Studies"—and a recent book, "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World". A new exhibition at Somerset House in London (pictured) also examines the ubiquity of cuteness in culture, bringing together art, games and toys. Cuteness "has taken over", says Claire Catterall, the curator. "It's infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives."

What do humans consider cute? In the 1940s Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist, found that people are drawn to babies with big eyes, a small nose and mouth and round cheeks, as well as a pudgy body, short arms and legs and a wobbly gait. These traits motivated people to nurture and protect babies, helping ensure their survival. Humans are so drawn to these attributes that cats and dogs may have been bred to emphasise those same features. Cartoon characters have morphed, too. For instance, Mickey Mouse's arms, legs and nose have shrunk since 1928, while his head and eyes have become larger.

A study from 2015 found that participants felt more energetic and positive, and less annoyed, anxious or sad, after watching cat videos. Morten Kringelbach, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, has studied the brain's rapid reaction to baby faces: the orbitofrontal cortex—a region linked with pleasure, among other things—is activated within a seventh of a second. (Men and women are equally eager to look at adorable infants.)

Cuteness is not a new obsession. Japanese artists in the Edo period (between 1603 and 1868) painted puppies or fashioned them out of ivory. Joshua Paul Dale, the author of "Irresistible", argues that the popularity of Cupids in Renaissance and Rococo art made winged babies "the major expression of cuteness in Western art for three centuries". Technology has offered new ways to enjoy winsome things. Harry Pointer's photographs from the 1870s, on display at Somerset House, depict felines in anthropomorphised ways, sitting on tricycles or in prams. As he added amusing captions, he is credited as the inventor of the cat meme.

It was in the 20th century that cuteness dug in its tiny claws. Walt Disney brought a parade of wide-eyed creatures to cinemas across the world. (He apparently instructed his animators to "Keep it cute!") Japanese kawaii culture also went global, with the spread of anime films and manga comic books. After the advent of mass production, cute trinkets and toys became widely available; Sanrio, which owns Hello Kitty, has $3.8bn in sales a year.

Then, with the internet, cuteness became available on demand. People could watch and share amusing content of their children or favourite animals at any time—in 2022 more than 90,000 videos of cats were uploaded to YouTube every day. So voracious is the appetite for cute content that in 2014, when Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was asked what surprised him most about internet usage, he replied simply: "Kittens."

Cuteness has real-world uses. Lovot, a doe-eyed companion robot with a button nose, is covered in sensors and responds positively when cuddled. Such innovations may help combat loneliness among the elderly. Policymakers, too, might harness the power of cute to nudge people's behaviour. Japan's kawaii barriers are thought to reduce road-rage incidents. Putting images on bins of sea turtles or dolphins trapped in rubbish has been shown to reduce plastic waste. Mr Kringelbach says that cute babies can encourage people to have empathy for demonised groups such as refugees. An appreciation for cute things is a joy in and of itself, but it also "has the potential to change the world", he argues. How's that for a cute idea?

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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.Economist.Com

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Published: 03 Apr 2024, 05:00 PM IST

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