The Truth Behind the Myth of Boiling Frogs
Sometimes we’ll put up with anything. Sometimes it takes brain damage.
A common warning on the internet is to beware a slow invasion. If things change slowly enough, you may not realize how drastically things have changed. “A frog will jump out of a pot of boiling water if placed in, but will boil to death if placed in room temperature water that’s slowly heated.”
It’s a story that sounds plausible, but deserves a second look from a biologist’s perspective. Spoiler alert up front: frogs will hop out of water when it grows too warm.
But where did this claim come from? How do cold-blooded animals, like frogs, respond to heat? What happens if a cold-blooded creature gets too hot?
Thankfully, frogs, like the rest of us, have finely tuned heat detection mechanisms.
Managing heat when you don’t make any
Frogs are in a class of animals called amphibians; they have soft, moist skin, four limbs, and are cold-blooded. This means that they don’t produce their own body heat, like we (mammals) do. In order to gather enough energy to move about, they need to seek out external heat sources, like sunlight.
