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Interesting Creatures
Exploring Frogs With Transparent Skin
They’re called glass frogs and you can see their insides right through their skin!
I’m a big fan of frogs and toads. I have toad and frog tchotchkes scattered throughout my home. When I was just a little tyke, we lived in a suburb that had a pond at the end of our street. A little stream flowed out of that pond, and every spring, we kids on the block would see tadpoles wiggling around in the shallow parts of the stream, and we could watch them mature, grow legs, and eventually become frogs.
It was inevitable that at some point, I was probably about 9 or 10 years old, I brought a bunch of tadpoles home and, with the help of my Mom and Dad, set up some kind of system where I could raise them in our backyard to see them change and become adult frogs.
That was super cool. And, of course, all summer long, we’d hear the frogs in the pond croaking and calling to each other. It was also super cool to watch them catch a bug! Ok, I’m about to really date myself here (warning, frog dissection description below).
In my college introductory biology course, to study spinal cords and transmission of nerve signals, we would obtain and paralyze live frogs by pithing them (inserting a dissecting needle into…
