Find Articles in:
All
Business
Reference
Technology
News
Lifestyle

Tadpoles kill by supersuction - Zoology - African dwarf clawed frogs - Brief Article

Science News, Nov 16, 2002

Tadpoles of African dwarf clawed frogs catch their prey by a surprising means.

Tadpoles typically work their elaborate, jagged mouthparts over a surface, making a soup of the scrapings. Pumping movements of the mouth cavity gently pull in and filter the resulting slurry.

Researchers discovered something quite different when they turned a high-speed video camera on young Hymenochirus boettgeri not quite 3 millimeters in length. These tiny tadpoles rely on a superfast suction technique to catch prey such as minuscule water fleas, say Stephen Deban at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Wendy Olson of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In the Nov. 7 Nature, the researchers report that the tadpoles track each prey individually and then suddenly extend their tube-shaped mouths to suck in the prey within 7 milliseconds. (For video, see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~deban/hymenomovie.html.)

Although larvae of certain fish also hunt this way, the researchers were intrigued to discover that a quite different animal had evolved the same approach.--S.M.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Science Service, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

The following tags are supported in BNET comments:
<b></b> <i></i> <u></u> <pre></pre>

Leave a Reply

  1. You are currently a guest | Login?
advertisement
CIO SessionsVision Series on ZDNet

See and hear what CIOs the world over thinks about the business of technology and how it's changing the way we live and work.

Go
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement

Content provided in partnership with http://findarticles.com/source//