Science & Discovery: Scientists find frogs that hear with mouths

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   Scientists find frogs that hear with mouths

         

    Scientists said Monday that they have solved the mystery of why one of the world’s smallest frogs, known as Gardiner’s Seychelle frog, can hear without an ear.

Gardiner’s frogs from the Seychelles islands, which are just one centimeter long, can hear sounds because they use their mouth cavity and tissue to transmit sound to their inner ears, researchers reported in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Most frogs do not possess an outer ear like humans, but a middle ear with an eardrum located directly on the surface of the head. Incoming sound waves make the eardrum vibrate, and the eardrum delivers these vibrations using ossicles to the inner ear where hair cells translate them into electric signals sent to the brain.

Scientists previously thought that it’s impossible to detect sound in the brain without a middle ear because 99.9 percent of a sound wave reaching an animal is reflected at the surface of its skin.

“However, we know of frog species that croak like other frogs but do not have tympanic middle ears to listen to each other. This seems to be a contradiction,” lead author Renaud Boistel from the University of Poitiers in France said in a statement.

To establish whether Gardiner’s frogs actually use sound to communicate with each other, the researchers set up loudspeakers in their natural habitat and broadcast pre-recorded frog songs. This caused male frogs present in the rainforest to answer, proving that they were able to hear the sound from the loudspeakers, the researchers said.

They then identified the mechanism by which these seemingly deaf frogs were able to hear sound. Various mechanisms have been proposed: an extra-tympanic pathway through the lungs, muscles which in frogs connect the pectoral girdle to the region of the inner ear, or bone conduction.

As these animals are tiny, just one centimeter long, the researchers used X-ray images of the soft tissue and the bony parts with micrometric resolution to determine which body parts contribute to sound propagation.

They found that neither the pulmonary system nor the muscles of these frogs “contribute significantly” to the transmission of sound to the inner ears.

Numerical simulations helped investigate the third hypothesis, that the sound was received through the frogs’ heads. These simulations confirmed that the mouth acts as a resonator, or amplifier, for the frequencies emitted by this species.

Synchrotron X-ray imaging on different species showed that the transmission of the sound from the oral cavity to the inner ear has been optimized by two evolutionary adaptations: a reduced thickness of the tissue between the mouth and the inner ear and a smaller number of tissue layers between the mouth and the inner ear.

“The combination of a mouth cavity and bone conduction allows Gardiner’s frogs to perceive sound effectively without use of a tympanic middle ear,” Boistel said.

As Gardiner’s frogs have been living isolated in the rainforest of the Seychelles for 47 million to 65 million years, since these islands split away from the main continent, the findings indicated that “their auditory system must be a survivor of life forms on the ancient supercontinent Gondwana,” Boistel concluded.

   Source: Xinhua

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