Wood frogs, which take on the temperature of their environment, survive as far north as the Brooks Range because their bodies are able to freeze and thaw without bursting.
A wood frog pauses in the forest just off the Yukon River near the mouth of the Nation River. The palm-sized amphibians were hibernating in a box outside Brian Barnes’ Fairbanks home a few decades ago. Barnes, director of the Institute of Arctic Biology, and his students were in his living room checking a temperature gauge he recently plucked from the “frog corral.”The temperature at frog level, under a few inches of snow and moss, had dipped to 10 degrees in December.
Barnes’ lab tests, performed on Alaska wood frogs, showed the same thing: 10 degrees is just too cold for a wood frog. If its blanket of forest litter and snow isn’t thick enough to keep it warmer than 20 degrees, it will, in theory, die.Theory took a hit a few days later. As the frogs thawed in Barnes’ garage, they began twitching, then hopping around. All five frogs groggily woke in mid-December, perhaps wondering which way to the breeding pond.
As a wood frog’s body freezes, its liver converts glycogen to sugary glucose. All its vital systems are flooded with the sweet liquid, which helps cells resist drying. Though its cells are protected, a hibernating wood frog is frozen like a little green ice sculpture, including its heart and brain and eyeballs.
Three months later, the students returned to check the temperature within the frogs’ chosen wintering spots. Though the air temperature above had once fallen below minus 30, the frog in the sand by the horse trailer never got colder than 27 above. The one that chose to tunnel into the moss didn’t experience temperatures colder than 31.
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