frog update- new wannabe coming

a Mahler song begins, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen..."

"I have been so absent from the world that the world thinks me dead and truly I am dead..." 

however, the frogs are alive and growing bigger--well, two are visibly bigger and happier than ever.  Mirucek enjoys his status as Elder Frog and his presence is undisputed and uncontested as a day hunter and Tertius is just slightly smaller than him, but prefers to do his stalking at night and in the wee hours of morn. Tertius is incredibly agile despite being a water frog and does some amazing, lively hopping that  aeronautics engineers ought to study for helicopter maneuvers. he can easily leap straight vertical and turn 90 degrees midair to land adroitly and accurately on some unsuspecting  subject of his voracious diet. And although he lumbers and struggles on land with obstacles such as twigs, his agility in the ari is truly  amazing and surpasses even the best of Chinese gymnasts.

 Mirucek climbing in the refurbished Frog Hotel after the Grasshopper Devastation

Tertius, unlike Mirucek, does not have a jointed hip and therefore is not capable of walking. He can hop, but this is an art that Mirucek stumbles over. The hunting methods are quite different, as Tertius is generally an agressive attacker who will sit in the water or frogbasin and watch the movement outside.  being dark, he easily blends in wiht any background and often pretends to be a rock, allowing grasshoppers and others to walk  up to him and into his mouth. Whenever he has caught his prey, he leaps back into his hiding place to digest his meal and  retires there until the next  round of hunger.

 Tertius downing a butterfly larger than himself.

Mirucek, though, hunts or nabs his prey mostly during the day and usually in the afternoon. He is  much more likely to sit on his roost on the  apple twig or hide underneath it in his  "off hours".  he too, will sit incredibly still so that the insects  walk over his face, but unlike tertius, he has  much more defined culinary tastes. He will not eat every bug that  crawls on his head and he pointedly ignores thigns with hard shells such as ladybugs, which Tertius will greedily devour if  suffering a carbohydrate attack.

Mirucek is curious about food, but if it isn;t palatable, he will spew it out and thereafter ignore anything that resembles it.  On encountering a dragonfly, he was curious and spent  a very long time styudying it, but when he was convinced that it was something buglike, he snapped at the long hard tube extending under the wings to find out that it ws about as palatable as a plastic straw. Disgusted he spat it out, and then tried a second time to get a good chomp on the matter. The second time, he pulled the straw out of his mouth with his hands and struck it to the ground and walked off visibly disgusted with the whole lot of dragonflies that  buzz about the universe. However, he has a very strong liking for little  white pearl spiders that  surpasses even his prediliction for greenflies. Keeping a frog satisified and happy is a realatively difficult specialty of  catch and see.  Grasshoppers are palatable, but there's only so many a frog can eat and their legs have a tendency to get stuck in the craw.

 Mirucek,  two months old. June 5,2007 first day of Froghood.

A frog can easily eat something three times its size. It has the consumption of a boa constrictor in relation to this matter. it swallows the food head down and to process the the ingestion, the frog hits its eyeballs with its hands. Laugh not. A frog's eyes retract in order to press food down into the stomach, so it is possible tha with a very large victim, the frog whacks his head in order to aid digestion.  Some things are obviously not desirable, but it takes a little guessing at first what they are. tertius will eat just about anything it seems, but the average frog, from my group at least, likes the soft-shelled or soft-bodied over the hard shell ladybug,  beetle or zigaenidae.

 Moreover, if a frog swallows something indigestible or difficult such as a long string of grass in Mirucek's case or a greenfly in Peanut's case, it can systematically remove the matter from its digestive track by "burrping" and retrieving the matter with its hands.  Although Mirucek's  prey was entangled with a long string of wiry grass, Mirucek  downed both and then for over an hour, carefully disgorged the blade of grass.  Peanut snapped down a greenfly off the  Froghotel wall that was hovering  nearly four times his height above him. His eyes were obviously much bigger than his stomach as the greenfly was nearly three times his size. Determined he swallowed it, but halfway down, it seemed that his prey was still alive and tickling his insides. Disgusted with the fly for his survival reflexes, Peanut quickly pulled the fly from his mouth and threw it to the ground. Although it looked dead, it obviusly revived because a few seconds later it was gone.

 Peanut bewildered by the sudden change.

 Peanut lurking for prey.

 Ludwig Beethoven follows the patterns of Tertius and although I cannot see what he is hunting, he seems exceptionally lively for  a starving frog.

 Ludwig van Beethoven watches his victim.

 Ludwig van Beethoven on the rim of Frogbasin.

That leaves Secundus, who seems to have vanished from public view in the last week. Secundus and Peanut are so similar in appearance that it si difficult to tell them apart, but the obvious difference under the camera is that Peanut has a shape like a squirrel frog and brown eyes, whereas Secundus had a gold ring about his eyes similar to Mirucek.  Secundus also has the very long toes of Mirucek, but it seems that his skin has turned as dark as tertius, thereby making him nearly invisible in plain sight.

   Secundus taking a climb in the refurbished Frog Hotel after the Grasshopper Devastation.

 Beethoven is still microscopic, so have little or no idea of what he eats, buthe's doing fine.

And no update would be complete without the announcement of another  Wannabe Frog, albeit seemly late in the season...

And so I am happy to announce that from the last batch from Srbsko, I have a new potential frog for the Frog Hotel in Prague.

 Today's Edition

That's all folks.

and these pictures were all taken by a Rebel XTi with 100mm 2.8 lens so kindly given to me from contributors on Gather.

It's just that the computer  had to be upgraded to support the camera and there were many complications in the process.