asakiyume | Entries tagged with frogs

Wakanomori and I went walking with a friend at the Quabbin Reservoir, and we came to a little pool that was alive with frogs, swimming around in the melting water above the ice still covering the pool. Amazing! Aren't they cold blooded? But they didn't seem to mind the icewater--they swam powerful breaststrokes this way and that in the three inches of water above the ice.

Wakanomori took this video. You have to turn the sound up very high in order to hear them, probably. Unfortunately, no closeups of the athletic swimmers, but imagine them with long thin arms and legs and graceful webbed feet and hands, swimming here and there, and singing.

Watch on YouTube

When we visited Bogotá in 2018, Wakanomori noticed that the manhole covers had frogs on them:

I always meant to find out the story behind the frog--was it a particular frog? Why a frog? But I never did.

Then the other day, Juegasiempre (also known as DjLu), one of the graffiti artists/muralistas whose work we became acquainted with on that trip, posted this beautiful frog on Twitter: la rana sabenera, Dendropsophus molitor. (Wikipedia tells me in English it's called the green dotted tree frog.) He posted that it used to be very common in the ravines of Bogotá, but now you can hardly find it. (Original tweet here.)

La Rana Sabanera, Dendropsophus molitor

I took it into my head that this MUST be the frog on the manhole covers and finally set about to find the answer.

... Well, it's not. The manhole frog is just a generalized frog, not any particular frog, but I found out that frogs have been on Bogotá's manhole covers for more than a hundred years, getting redesigns now and then. Some people thought the design was of a toad (sapo), so the workers for the Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado (Bogota's water and sewer company) would sometimes be called sapos. This is unfortunate because several years of watching telenovelas has taught me that that's also what you call a snitch.

There's a Facegroup page for people who want to preserve them--it's got some photos:

As for D. molitor, it's found only in Colombia. Females are larger than males, and they can grow to be about 70 mm. They can be green or brown, and some have stripes or lines that can be black, yellow, or blue. Although Wikipedia lists it as a species of least concern, one article I found said it's threatened in parts of Colombia by the introduction of another type of frog that competes for the same habitat.

Here's a cutie from Wikipedia (link):

Live long and prosper, little guy!

Resources consulted

"Conoce a la colorida rana que habita los humedales de Bogotá," Obervatorio Ambiental de Bogotá, 14 September 2020.

"Una rana nueva llega al acueducto," El Tiempo, 5 October 1991.

"Preservemos las Tapas del Acueducto de Bogotá; Disprivatizar el Acueducto" (Facebook page)

"Dendropsophus molitor," Wikipedia.

Current Music: Pete Seeger: Frog Went a-Courting

On the way to the supermarket and back I saw three creatures.

First was a northern leopard frog, sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, in meditative contemplation, staring at the grass.

Here is a photo of a northern leopard frog from the Internet (source). Like my leopard frog, he is staring to the left.

He looked like Bodhidharma, who meditated so deeply he lost his arms and legs.

Bodhidharma (source)

Only, my frog's arms and legs were still intact, and the fingers of his hands were pointing inward, like he was getting ready to make a sitting bow.

I kept walking and later I heard a noise like a cat hissing or like a red-tailed hawk screaming--but very quietly (khhhhhaaaaaa!), and there was a rustling in the grass. I looked, and a garter snake slithered away. I hadn't known they could make such a noise!

On the way back, the snake was long gone, but the frog was still there, still doing zazen. I didn't have a camera, so I crouched down to sketch him, but I only managed his hands before he decided he'd had enough and took one big leap into the green.

A little farther on, I ran into a rabbit--who also took a leap into the green, flashing its tail as it went. What a lot of wildlife for a very short walk.

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with frogs

frogs in ice melt

La Rana Sabanera: Dendropsophus molitor

another walk

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