Mate with me

The little frogs are back, singing their hearts out.

Frog eyes are pretty cool. Their eye muscles pull the eyeballs back down into their skull for an extra push in swallowing a large catch.

Bullfrogs are among the few animals that see into the infrared.

Their eyes are sensitive enough to detect a single photon, whereas our eyes need several photons to register the presence of light.

And he must ponder parallel universes while peering through pairs of slits…

But then our quantum observer gets back to the business at hand, and croaks away

Oh, and how could I forget…. the vision system is even more interesting….

Frogs have binocular vision to catch flies. Tadpoles have eyes on the sides of their heads, a common difference between predator and prey.

The eyes move halfway through life, and so the visual system in the frog’s brain needs to be rewired. The nerves from half of the tadpole’s eyes must remap to the other half of the brain to properly process the new overlapping field of view.

The ephrin B gene modulates the axon’s growth cone in the optic chiasm (a crossroads junction of sorts) to achieve binocular vision. The same gene serves the same function in mice, but is silent in fish and chicken, which lack binocular vision.