There’s a little difficulty with researching animals when they’re under a certain size. For example, take the world’s smallest frog. How do you determine whether or not the 10-milimeter (.4-inch) long Mount Iberia frog (AKA Eleutherodactylus iberia) is indeed poisonous? Well, first you have to catch the adorable little bugger, then you have to test his skin excretions. As it turns out, the Mount Iberia frog is the world’s smallest frog, per the Guinness World Records organization, and it packs a pretty potent poison.
“You have to crawl on your knees and move leaf by leaf,” said Miguel Vences, evolutionary biologist at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. “And when you discover one of these frogs, they usually jump away immediately so that you have to start all over again.”
Of course, the tiny frog opens up a host of other questions, like why isn’t it even smaller since it’s not a warm-blooded creature and doesn’t need to self-regulate. There’s any of number of reasons why it might not be smaller, including egg production, water loss, food sources, and other issues related to its tiny, but not too tiny, size. It’s a little frog with big mysteries.
Tags: Miguel Vences, Mount Iberia frog, 10mm-long frog, tiny frogs, Guinness World Records, unusual animals, world’s smallest frog, tiny frogs, weird animals, poisonous animals, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, Eleutherodactylus iberia
