Nonfiction: Frogs

Frogs are fragile. When one is splayed open on the classroom table in front of you, it's hard not to get a distinct impression of how little it takes to kill a frog. If a few well-placed cuts by a middle-schooler can leave it spread out, with its skin peeled back and its lungs on the right side of the pale plastic tray, imagine how easy predators must have it. My first cut met with almost no resistance. The skin slid a bit over the soft, unprotesting insides as though unattached, and the blade threatened to sink too deep too quickly. My forceps slowly drew back the spotted skin, like curtains opening to reveal a stage. Only moments later the lungs were plucked out, and I was in search of the other major organs. When the key element to a successful dissection is to not do too much unintentional damage, it makes one wonder how the things survive at all on their own. The whole body feels malleable. I can see the bones in front of me, but the whole ribcage compresses at the slightest pressure.

Of course, people are fragile too, when you think about it. Sure, I might not be able to compress our ribcages with a fingertip, but it's all a matter of scale. And scalpels cut just as easily through our skin, which, while it doesn't peel back like curtains, also can't absorb water like the frogs'. Our lungs might not find their way outside our bodies so effortlessly, but that's just because we rely on them so heavily. Frogs, I have recently learned, can absorb oxygen from the water, so it's only natural that they value their lungs a little less than I might find reasonable. In fact, in many ways, the frogs have us beaten.

While we have spent thousands of years trying to invent tools to achieve various phenomena, the frogs simply incorporate them into their very being. Breathe underwater? Check. Kill things effortlessly? Another check. The golden poison arrow frog is too dangerous even to hold, and two tenths of a microgram of its poison can be fatal. And speaking of fatality: Life after death? Another check. Wood frogs are routinely frozen solid, with all brain activity stopped and no pulse, and yet they start hopping around like normal after a few hours to thaw.

Of course the frog in front of me is neither a wood frog nor a poison arrow frog. It's a simple bullfrog, and all it had going for it was the first thing on the list. Of course, I can't even breathe underwater, so who am I to marvel at its delicacy?