Hey about your cartoon vs Real life Animals post, can you elaborate on the lenght of frog tongues? This is the one that shocked me, i study in a Field closely related to zoology and never heard that their tongues are human-like short, unless you were trying to make a point about their shape and not lenght, then Please disregard my inquiry :p
When I say their tongues are “more human-like” than chameleon-like, I mean, this is a chameleon’s tongue:
And this is a frog’s tongue:
A chameleon has an astonishingly long, thin tongue that launches like a grappling hook, and almost all media thinks this is also true of frogs and toads.
The tongues of frogs and toads DO come out farther than ours, especially because they attach at the front of their mouth, rather than the back, and “flip” outward to grab prey:
But yes, between the two, their tongues are nowhere near like those of chameleons, but broad and flat like ours. The very farthest they can stretch is like this:
When you google frog or toad tongues, unfortunately, you get many more fakes than the real thing, to the point that even science articles have been known to use them
And, the first time I ever posted about this subject, someone retrieved exactly this fake photo to try and prove that I was making all this up. Frogs have never done this! Cartoons simply exaggerated it for fun at first, and then I guess confusion with chameleon tongues lead people to believe they worked similarly!
It’s such a pervasive misunderstanding that I didn’t know about until my teens, and I was a biology nerd well before that too. It felt like a betrayal. I was never made to believe in Santa Claus but finding out frogs Don’t Do That felt how I imagine that feels. Frog tongues were my Santa Isn’t Real moment.
But, frog tongues are in my opinion just as interesting as chameleon tongues. Besides the weird flip-out structure they are extremely adhesive and also so soft and membranous that they practically “shrink wrap” to the prey! Terrifying!!! Getting got by a giant frog would be like getting wrapped up in a giant stretchy sheet of cellophane covered in glue!
