The mystery of transparent frogs and why they could help prevent disease

A recent study has suggested that the glass frogs from Costa Rica may be able to help prevent fatal blood clots in humans.

This has to do with one of the peculiarities of the animal: make you, at times, almost completely invisible.

Glass frogs use tricks to avoid persistent colors so that they are virtually invisible so that predators don’t see them. But in most cases, in any case, you can see some of their organs.

What the study of biologists has now shown Jesse Delia (American Museum of Natural History in New York) e Carlos Taboada (Duke University), published Thursday in the magazine Scienceis that when these frogs rest, their red blood cells lodge in their livers and become virtually invisible.

The finding could help learn how to prevent blood clots, since frogs rely on hemoglobin, a colorful protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen around the body.

To verify this, the researchers resorted not to light, but to sound, and came to a conclusion when they realized that the frogs behaved differently when they were anesthetized and when they were asleep.

Can it help humans?

Biologists still don’t understand how the animals were able to bring all their cells together without dying of blood clots, which bodes well.

In most vertebrates, when blood cells collide with each other, clotting occurs and the resulting clot can form a scab to seal a wound or, if the clot is in a blood vessel, it can clog the circulatory system and kill the creature.

What Delia and Taboada discovered is this glass frogs controlled, so to speak, coagulation. If future research can shed light on what keeps them safe, it could lead to treatments to reduce clot-related deaths in humans.

Keep in mind that in the United States, up to 100,000 people die each year from blood clots, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

glass frogs

Glass frogs are native to forests in Central and South America, distributed from southern Mexico to Panama and, across the Andes, from Venezuela to Bolivia.

Some species occur in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, the Guiana massif, southeastern Brazil and northern Argentina, and throughout Colombia.

Since they are arboreal, they inhabit only the undergrowth, in the tree layer or in areas near rivers and streams of tropical forests.