This story is incredible, I’m fascinated by every aspect of it:
- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?
- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?
- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
Urine has long been used in medical testing and treatment. The term diabetes mellitus comes from the sweet taste of patients’ urine, for instance.
Estrogen extracted from pregnant women’s urine used to be used as a supplement for menopausal women. I read recently that some doctors would overprescribe urine tests during pregnancy, bill the patient and sell the excess urine.
Later as an estrogen supplement came Premarin, which is made from pregnant mares’ urine.
Fun fact: The frogs also can change color from black to green and back (perhaps dark green to light green).
They have some cells in the skin with black blobs full of melanin, and they can move them. Usually they are disperse and the color is dark, but with some hormone the blobs are transported to the nuclei of the cell and the color is light.
We used cells of this frog in a undergaduate lab for physics. The main task was to fine tune a microscope to track the blobs. So we cultivate the cells for a week (from a cell line, the original frog was gone long ago), we put the cells under the microscope and add an hormone to force the change of color in a minute or so. (I think in the wild the change of color is very slow.)
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] thread- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?
- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?
- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
I crave a one-hour documentary about this.
Estrogen extracted from pregnant women’s urine used to be used as a supplement for menopausal women. I read recently that some doctors would overprescribe urine tests during pregnancy, bill the patient and sell the excess urine.
Later as an estrogen supplement came Premarin, which is made from pregnant mares’ urine.
They have some cells in the skin with black blobs full of melanin, and they can move them. Usually they are disperse and the color is dark, but with some hormone the blobs are transported to the nuclei of the cell and the color is light.
We used cells of this frog in a undergaduate lab for physics. The main task was to fine tune a microscope to track the blobs. So we cultivate the cells for a week (from a cell line, the original frog was gone long ago), we put the cells under the microscope and add an hormone to force the change of color in a minute or so. (I think in the wild the change of color is very slow.)
Something like this (not my video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJSA_v0ics
Why? Annoyingly typical of the BBS to throw in that detail and not follow it up.