Two indigenous Japanese animals were the subject of a surprizing recent discovery by a biologist at Kobe University.
Shinji Sugiura, PhD, found in laboratory experiments that the aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata had a 90 percent chance of emerging alive out of the rear end of the dark-spotted frog, according to an interview with The New York Times.
The creatures tend to frequent the same paddy fields in Japan. But Sugiura observed that when the animals were placed in a controlled environment, a beetle eaten by the frog would emerge unscathed a short while later.
According to the Times article, Sugiura “can’t say for sure what their strategy is. But when he immobilized the beetles’ legs with wax, they died a slow digestive death.”
Sharing the video to YouTube on August 3, Sugiura commented that the beetle can “actively escape” from the frog using its digestive system. He added that this species of beetle may “promote frog excretion to facilitate its escape”.
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Sugiura has trialed this experiment on 50 other aquatic species and insects, but this species of beetle is the only one that has survived this method of escape, according to an interview with mainichi.jp.
Source: Storyful
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