When a glass frog wakes up and starts moving around, the blood that it had hidden in its liver while sleeping starts to circulate once more, decreasing the tiny frog’s transparency.
What may be even more amazing to humans — prone to circulatory sludge and clogs — is that the frogs hold almost all their red blood cells packed together for hours with no blood clots, says co-discoverer Jesse Delia, now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Wake the frog up, and cells just unpack themselves and get circulating again..
What got Delia wondering about transparency was a photo emergency. He had studied glass frog behavior, but had never even seen them asleep. “They go to bed, I go to bed — that was my life for years,” he says. When he needed some charismatic portraits, however, he put some frogs in lab dishes and at last saw how the animals sleep the day away.
“It was really obvious that I couldn’t see any red blood in the circulatory system,” Delia says. “I shot a video of it — it was crazy.” As he pitched his project to a Duke University lab for support, he was stunned to discover that another young researcher was pitching the same lab to study transparency in glass frogs. “I was like, oh, man,” Delia says. But the leader of the biological optics lab at Duke, Sönke Johnsen, told Delia and his rival, Taboada, that they had different skill sets and should tackle the problem together. “I think we were hardheaded at first,” Delia says. “Now I consider him as close as family.
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