Wolverine frogs fights & grabs mates with bony thumb | 台北市立動物園資訊網

2012年10月18日—It'slargeforafrog,growingtoaround12centimetresinlength.Themalesusetheirspikesasanchorstolatchontofemales,andflick-knivesfor ...

Iwai first described the spike in 2010, but she had no idea how it was used. The species is hard to study—it’s endangered, and only found on in the Amami Islands in southern Japan. Since then, Iwai has been carefully observing the frogs at their breeding sites, videotaping their behaviour with infrared cameras, and gently inspecting captured animals.

When captured, they’d kick out furiously. But when something irritated their chest, they’d pull their arms in and jab the spines towards themselves, as if to deliver a stabbing hug. The jabs of female frogs are so weak that they barely hurt. The males, however, are more forceful – they are bigger, they have longer and thicker thumb-spikes, and they’re better at unsheathing those spikes from their thumbs. In the delightfully deadpan style of academia, Iwai wrote: “If jabbed in the finger by a male’s spines, the researcher responded by dropping t...