We’ve got a new pond which must be half a mile away from the nearest lake/river yet frogs and toads have populated it almost immediately. How do they know where to find these new habitats?
In: Biology
You know, I’m kinda pissed. I tried making an ELI5 post about animal behavior about a week ago, and it was automatically removed because animal behavior questions are against ELI5 rules. Instead I had to search for 3 different subreddits who would take my question, and none of them answered as sincerely as ELI5 would have, so I basically never got my question answered. But this person?? And many others here??? Can all have their animal behavior posts put up and not taken down. I’m fricken sick of feeling like my posts get targeted for removal by bots when other people can get away with exactly the same kind of benign posts. TOO MANY RULES!
When I lived in southern Georgia as a kid, the subtropical rain would leave water standing in ditches and low places for months. Invariably small minnows and crayfish as well as the typical tadpoles would appear. I always attributed it to the white heron (egret) who loved to mill about these places and maybe somehow transported eggs along on their feet. Just a guess though..
Insects and some animals take notice of polarized light which is what happens when light reflects off of a body of water especially at night. A full moon over a still pond becomes like a beacon to them. This is how mosquitoes know where to lay their eggs.
There are toads that live in the desert where they hibernate for most of the year in these weird sacks that preserve their moisture underground. When it rains the few times a year, they wake and reproduce, but most of the time they are underground.
I trunk it has encoded in their instincts. We really depend more on our technology now verses our natural instincts today. The same way salmon instinctively know how to find their original breeding grounds, sea turtles travel thousands of miles to the beaches they hatched from and so on…
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People are explaining how animals can sense water, but another thing to think about is how many animals just die. If frogs from a pond head in several different directions, some will find new water and others will just die, either from dehydration or from predation/accidents along the way.
This kind of reminds me of the relatively frequent question about how animals manage to eat raw meat or drink stagnant water without dying, while humans can’t. And the answer is that many of them do die, and that humans could do the same if we were willing to have a much higher mortality rate.
We have a few water tanks (maniacs ponds) on our deer lease that somehow always have turtles in them. No idea where they came from or how they find them but they always do.
Did you post your pond on Twitter? There you go.
The answer most likely lies in the taste and odor chemicals 2-MIB and Geosmin. They can be detected in such small quantities and are produced by Cyanobacteria and algae. The smell that makes a lake smell like a lake.
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