Australian green tree frogs have no trouble getting rid of foreign bodies (Image: Steven David Miller/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features)
Rarely, people who have had surgery find that a piece of equipment has been left inside their bodies. If only they were frogs, they could absorb it into their bladders and urinate it out.
“As far as we know, frogs are the only animals to expel foreign objects through the bladder,” says of Charles Darwin University in Alice Springs, Australia, who 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, . 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.
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He found that the frogs’ bladder tissue responded to a foreign object by growing out, surrounding it and pulling it into the organ.
Other animals can get rid of foreign objects through their intestines, says of the University of Sydney, who observed this in snakes. The ability is probably fairly common, he adds.
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