Wonder Frog!
Amazing frog gives birth through its mouth
by Carl Wieland
The discovery of a species of frog which rears its young in its stomach
stunned the world of science. When the female of Rheobatrachus silus was
found in 1973 in south-east Queensland, Australia, she was observed to give birth
to live young through her mouth!
The mother frog swallows her eggs after fertilization, and then stops feeding. For
six or more weeks these eggs develop and pass through a type of tadpole stage, all
inside the stomach, without being digested or passed further along the intestine.
The frog’s stomach is quite normal—it secretes hydrochloric acid and
a powerful enzyme which together would normally break down and digest anything in
the stomach. However, the jelly around the eggs contains a special chemical which
not only ‘switches off' the production of the acid (thus halting the digestive
process) but appears to prevent the stomach from discharging its contents further
down the gut.
This chemical, prostaglandin E2, also relaxes the stomach wall, enabling it to thin
out and expand to an enormous degree. (More of this chemical is produced by the
tadpoles after they form.) Because there are as many as 26 young at a time, which
do not emerge until they have fully formed limbs, parts of the hugely distended
stomach become as thin and transparent as a plastic bag.
‘Giving birth’ has been known to happen with one huge vomit emptying
out the stomach; however, it is more usual for the births to be spaced out one at
a time, over as long as a week. To do this the mother comes up to the water surface
and relaxes her gullet. This allows a baby frog to come into her mouth and sit on
mother’s tongue before making its debut through her wide-open jaws.
It is mind-boggling to try to see how an evolutionist would begin to imagine how
a frog species successfully reproducing by egg-laying and a free-swimming tadpole
stage could or would have changed, by trial and error mutation/ selection, into
a stomach-brooding one. Neo-Darwinism insists that evolution happens by a series
of accidental changes (mutations) to the stuff of inheritance; each of these changes
must somehow make it more likely for that inherited information to be passed on
to the next generation, in order for it to be favoured by natural selection.
It should be obvious, though, that suffering a mutation which makes it more likely
for you to eat your own eggs is hardly likely to make your offspring more fit to
survive and reproduce!
The living world is full of such remarkable wonders which require the most tortuous
and imaginative efforts by evolutionists to show how they could have ‘just
happened’ without deliberate purpose and design. In reality, they testify
to the amazing ingenuity of God the Creator, and the diversity of His handiwork.
As the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 1:20, ‘the invisible
things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood
by the things that are made’.
Footnote:
Another species of this frog, Rheobatrachus vitellinus, was discovered
in central coastal Queensland in 1984. Both may now be extinct. This leaves many
other questions unanswered—how do the young get their oxygen and secrete their
wastes, for example? Interestingly, the stomach in R. vitellinus stays
normal throughout, without thinning and dilation. Further reading: M.J. Tyler, Australian
Frogs. Viking O’Neill, 1989, pp. 153–162. Scientific American,
July 1992, pp. 64–65.
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