Originally published at: Watch these miniature Brazilian frogs in all their awkward glory | Boing Boing
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new band name:
Pumpkin Toadlet
Maybe the Rayne frog festival can add a new event where these guys compete for title of silliest jump
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Some amphibians can’t even hop at all. If you want a silly escape strategy, check out these guys:
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Oh that’s so mean!
(watches video)
JFC 
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I’d say they could jump pretty well, they just can’t land. Big difference.
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That last one is my new spirit animal 
Also:
“She said there’s these hills where it’s hot and rains all the time, and in the rainforests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these like great big flowers called . . . bromeliads, I think, and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there’s a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don’t even know about the ground, and once you know the world is full of things like that, your life is never the same.” Terry Pratchett, Wings.
Maybe these guys don’t know about the ground… or gravity???
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These little frogs…
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It’s a good thing that having incredibly light bodies translates to low impact forces. They’ve survived and evolved to this point, so – yeah – it’s all good.
BTW, I really, really want to see this: “… they’re not particularly good walkers either. They sort of stomp around in a stilted, peg-like version of walking,”
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Frogs the size of a housefly. Hard to wrap my mind around that.
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They jump fine. They have a problem with landing.
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The landscape atop that mountain is amazing.
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Here’s one:
I’m thinking that the overall size of the frog isn’t the whole story- the smallest Eleutherodactylus are comparable in adult size and are quite nimble. There are also plenty of frog species that metamorphose at sub 10mm sizes and can jump as adeptly as the adults. Maybe Brachycephalus metamorphs are even tinier?
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I’m sure that I’m underestimating the amount of control-theory witchcraft required to maintain what we perceive as mere stability; but I’m a little surprised that inadequate sensor data leads to jumps that go so wrong so quickly even under laboratory conditions where the jump is starting and ending on the same uniform flat surface.
I’d be curious to know if this sort of particularly well-behaved case is enough of an edge case in nature that there’s simply no evolutionary pressure toward having a good dead-reckoning solution for it; or whether dead-reckoning solutions in general are either excessively difficult or so inflexible as to be minimally useful and there is no mechanism for frogs to build a library of no-sensor jumps, just bigger frogs doing feedback-driven jumps and teeny frogs doing feedback-driven jumps with terrible feedback.
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I have to admire how a particularly intense expression and very focused-looking eyes transform 'stilted, peg-like version of walking" into “deliberate, inexorable, march”(until the little guy spoils the effect by turning around).
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Well, on some level these seem like perfectly good jumps. The frog is too small for that kind of landing to do any injury to them, and it’s gotten away from where it was very quickly. I imagine at that scale most predators it encounters are ambushers rather than something that could chase after them…you see the same kind of reckless landings in a lot of insects with powerful jumps too.
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This should start at 2:26
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