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I’m talking about the real cryogenic stasis, frozen suspended animation, that sci-fi writers fantasize about in books and movies, and scientists theorize and experiment with. Before we dive into how the Wood Frog makes this human fantasy a reality, we need to know how freezing kills an organism.
Back on topic though. How does the wood frog freeze and survive the freeze?
As the temperature drops, the wood frog begins to create a lot of urine within its body but it doesn’t excrete it. One component of urine is urea and it stays in the bloodstream and cells. When this frog begins to freeze, its liver breaks down its stored sugars, or glycogen, into glucose and sends it to the cells. The combination of urea and glucose bind to water in the cells so that water can't bind with other water molecules to form ice. The cells are safe and alive. Eventually, the Wood Frog’s heart and breathing slow to a stop and 2/3rds of its body is frozen. It stays in this state for months! When spring comes and it thaws out, it slowly gets all it's body processes back and is ready to go into mating season in March. Sources Wood Frog Facts
Ectothermic Video Video of developing Wood Frogs: egg to adult frog Happy New Post Monday!
As you all have probably heard for the past two months, Winter is here! Here in northern North America, we have freezing temperatures with snow covered hills and sagging icicle covered trees. Some animals migrate and leave the cold behind. Some animals stay and go into sleeping states like torpor or hibernation in their hidden homes. Then there is the Wood Frog who says, no to leaving and sleeping through the wintry chill. Instead, the Wood Frog freezes into a frog-cicle, a state with no heartbeat or breathing. (This is not a technical term). Then it thaws in the warmer temperatures of spring, perfectly fine, healthy, and ready for mating season. Bonus Photograph: I usually only get to see my animals in photos online but, last summer, I found this adorable little Wood Frog while hiking the forests of Wachusett Reservoir. Mama Sea Otter is ready for her close ups! Here are some fun facts about sea otters and my thoughts on creating this doodle design: The first close up doodle shows Mama Sea Otter's baby wrapped in kelp and chilling in her tail on the water's surface. Sea otters are all fur no blubber. Their fur is so thick and insulating that they don't need blubber to keep warm. They constantly groom themselves to create air pockets in their fur and that keeps them insulated and warm. When their fur gets damaged from oil spills and/or pollution, they can die from exposure to the cold. Sea otter pup’s are born in the water. Pup's can't swim or dive but, after being groomed by their mom, they can float. When the mama sea otter needs to go hunt for food, she wraps her pup in kelp to prevent it from drifting off. In the second close up, can you spot the the kelp crab, mussels, sea urchins, brittle star, and kelp? Sea Otters are the perfect protectors of Kelp Forests. Sea otters eat the fish and shellfish that eat kelp. Even if they eat a piece of it, Sea Otters can't digest it. Along with being a food supply and home to many fish and shellfish, Kelp forests protect coastlines from erosion from wave damage and, like other trees and plants, are important to carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. If you have seen Blue Planet 2, can you spot the Garibaldi Damselfish being territorial and picking up a sea urchin. In the last close up, I put mussels and abalone in the armpit of Mama Sea Otter.
One of my favorite facts. Sea otters have loose skin under their arms that act like pockets. They hold food or their favorite rock. When they are floating on their backs, they take out this rock and put it on their stomach and use that rock to crack open clams, crabs, and other shellfish. One of the last hidden creatures is the giant kelp fish is hiding in the sea weed/ Mama Sea Otters fur. Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed this weeks close ups! Comment below if you have any questions or comments. For more facts check out these website: For Sea Otter Facts: https://www.mmc.gov/priority-topics/species-of-concern/southern-sea-otter/ https://seaotters.com/sea-otter-conservation/ https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animal-guide/marine-mammals/southern-sea-otter https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/s/sea-otter/ https://defenders.org/wildlife/sea-otter https://www.mmc.gov/priority-topics/species-of-concern/southern-sea-otter/ https://aquarium.org/a-sea-otters-toolkit/ Book: National Audubon Society Field Guide to Mammals North America Kelp forest: https://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/visit/ecosystems/kelpdesc.html https://frontierscientists.com/2013/10/sea-otters-kelp-forests-helping-you/
Happy New Years Eve Eve Everyone! Thank you to all my followers for enjoying my art! It was one of my big goals this year create and share my art! I hope you have and continue to enjoy my animal doodles and fun fact Mondays in 2020! It's the last Monday of 2019 so let's get into the last fun facts of the year! Why Bamboo?🎍 The question that stuck in my mind while researching these adorably cute black and white bears.🐼 Bamboo is about 99% of a Giant Panda's diet but there are so many reasons why it should not be the main food they eat.
At least they have some specialized features for eating bamboo.
Even with all the reasons why not to eat bamboo seeming to weigh more that the reasons to eat it, the Giant Panda eats bamboo anyway. 🤷♀️The start of the answer for how they survive off this diet is the amazing part!
Researchers and scientists studying this have not fully found the reason for "Why Giant Panda's eat bamboo?" It is definitely a bigger mystery than I thought when I started to make my "Giant Panda". Giant Panda Facts links:
https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/giant-panda https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/giant_panda/panda/what_do_pandas_they_eat/? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bamboo-fake-meat-giant-pandas-180972101/ https://www.chinahighlights.com/giant-panda/giantpanda-diet.htm https://www.pandasinternational.org/newsletter/11-bamboo-facts.html https://www.pandasinternational.org/bamboo-the-giant-diet-of-the-giant-panda/ https://www.britannica.com/animal/giant-panda https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144909/ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/how-pandas-survive-their-bamboo-only-diet https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/111017-pandas-bamboo-bacteria-plants-meat-bears-animals-science/ https://youtu.be/dqT-UlYlg1s https://youtu.be/G2DbShys9ww PBS Eons Merry Christmas Eve Eve to all my followers! ☃️
This is the last new doodle Monday in 2019! Today, I bring you an animal known for being adorably funny in videos and memes, the World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) logo animal, and a bamboo lover. Yes, of course the animal this week is the Giant Panda! 🐼 A funny creature whose design came to me quickly but whose research left me with many questions. One question in particular that confused me was: Why do Giant Panda's eat bamboo? 🎍 They have the digestive system of a carnivore and they eat a high fiber, low protein grass? Why? It is a mystery to be solved with some fun facts next Monday. I hope you enjoy my "Giant Panda" and have a wonderful Holiday season! Happy Monday!
Only one close up today because this doodle only has a hidden signature/my logo. So let’s dive into those fun facts! A group of krill are called a swarm and they can be seen from space! I still like my idea of calling them a Krillion. What do you think sounds better a swarm of krill or a krillion of krill? It might be too redundant and cheesy but I still like it! For a creature known for being numerous and getting eaten, you would think it would have a short life span. Maybe a year or two? Nope. Krill can live up to 10 years! The real question is how do they survive that long? They survive by staying in those swarms and by swimming deeper into the ocean during the day and coming to the surface to feed at night. Like I said last week, Krill are a keystone species vital to its marine southern ocean ecosystem. This week I want to illustrate this with two examples.
Like its known predator the blue whale, the Arctic Krill is a filter feeder but, instead of using baleen plates in their mouth, they use the many front arms to filter algae out of the water. Winter can be a hard hunting time even for these filter feeders so Krill have adapted to shrink when there is not enough food. Hope you enjoyed these fun facts! If you would like to learn more here are some websites I used to find these fun facts! Krill https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/group/krill/ https://oceana.org/marine-life/cephalopods-crustaceans-other-shellfish/antarctic-krill https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/animalsoftheice_krill/ http://www.krillfacts.org/1-krill-facts-center.html http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/big-ideas/krill/index.html Keystone Species https://frontier.ac.uk/blog/2017/11/23/the-importance-of-keystone-species Phytoplankton https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/phyto.html One of the millions, no billions, wait maybe trillions?
The Krill, paper clip size crustaceans, known for feeding the biggest creature known on Earth, the blue whale. My doodle is specifically based off of the Antarctic Krill, a keystone species of the Antarctic ocean. A vital species that keeps its ecosystem the way we see it now. Take out the krill and many of its predators lose a valuable source of protein and nutrients in a frozen land where food is scarce. I wanted to try something different this week so no hidden doodles within the doodle, other than my signature. Also the outline and color is created digitally rather than just my usual pen and ink. Hope you enjoy! The Portuguese Man O War looks like our media’s idea of what other worldly beings look like and the scientific words used to describe them sound out of this world. I am no expert on these organisms since I was introduced to them on Blue Planet II but I did have a confusingly fun time learning about them online. Here are some fun facts I found and tried to simplify. Hope you enjoy!
The Portuguese Man O War is a colony of single organisms called zooids. Zooids are so specialized in their jobs that they cannot function alone so they need to cooperate with other zooids to survive. From my understanding, Zooids with similar jobs like all the digestive zooids make up the digestive polyp. These organisms don’t really propel themselves, they just fill a translucent bladder (like a balloon) with gas and float with the waves. In the first close up, you can see this gas filled bladder. A crest on this bladder, it looks like a mohawk on the football shaped balloon, catches the wind and moves them. The tentacles can grow to more than 40 meters, that’s about 131 ft, and some can get longer! A blue whale is around 30 meters, approximately 98 ft, in length. The Portuguese Man O War can get as long as or longer blue whale! Let those words sink in… it's mind blowing! Comparatively, my doodle is probably a young Man O War with such short tentacles. Don't touch these tentacles though. Like I said in last week’s post, these things are venom filled or rather they have cells called nematocysts that are venom coils. Many prey animals they eat such as fish are paralyzed and killed with these neurotoxins. Even dead Portuguese Man O War or severed tentacles from them that wash to the shore can cause welts and allergic reactions in humans because they are still potent. In my second close up, you might see some animals such as the loggerhead sea turtle, violet sea snail with its bubble raft, and the blue sea slug (aka blue dragon) with what look to be long fingers. These are all predators of the Portuguese Man O War. For such potentially deadly creatures, the Portuguese Man O War have very fragile bodies and predators that are mostly immune to those painful tentacles or eat those poisonous nematocysts to use for their own protection have an easy time eating. Want to learn more? Here are some Links: Videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1ps0ooDhU – Blue Planet II- BBC One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTgLTbXJrfM - Portuguese Man-of-War | World's Weirdest Articles https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/p/portuguese-man-of-war/ https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Physalia_physalis/ http://www.siphonophores.org/ https://www.earthhistory.org.uk/corals-and-jellies/siphonophores http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2008/niemi_riss/interactions.htm |
Artist and Blogger
I'm just a doodling artist. My current style started in a lecture class at MCLA where I began doodling in my notebooks. Now I've started a new series focusing on animals. Archives
April 2021
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