Frogs can ‘pee out foreign objects’

LONDON - A new study has found that frogs can absorb foreign objects present in their bodies and urinate it out.

“As far as we know, frogs are the only animals to expel foreign objects through the bladder,” New Scientist quoted Christopher Tracy of Charles Darwin University in Alice Springs, Australia, as saying.

She made the discovery while monitoring wild frogs with implanted trackers.

Tracy noticed that many of the trackers wound up in the frogs’ bladders. Intrigued, he implanted small beads into captive Australian green tree frogs, Litoria caerulea.

The animals urinated them within weeks, so he did the same to cane toads, this time checking the location of the beads at different times to see how the process worked.

He found that the frogs’ bladder tissue responded to a foreign object by growing out, surrounding it and pulling it into the organ.

Rick Shine of the University of Sydney, who observed this in snakes, said that the ability is probably fairly common. (ANI)