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Three-Headed Frog? Nope—It's A Mating Ball

Its THREE frogs ,two male one female, the males are clamping onto the female (amplexus), quite common when spawning, seen this sort of thing myself. Nothing Fortean about it at all. Repeat THREE frogs.:blah:
 
Michael Watson said:
Nothing Fortean about it at all.
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Reports making big claims, 'experts' giving their considerd opinion on scanty evidence, etc. thats certainly something Fort would be interested in. ;)

My guess is the 'mutant frog' will never be seen again but it will crop up time and time again over the years when this kind of thing is discussed.

Emps
 
Three Headed Frog

Sorry if this is old.....

local6.com/news/2900371/detail.html
Link is dead.
 
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Bllody typical, find a deformed frog and speculate it was due to pollution?

How did people and mutants manage before pollution, I wonder?

Betcha its three intimate but generaly separate froggies!

Speaking of amphibians, have any of you lot ever seen a natterjack toad? Very pretty things, bright green with yellow spots and a red stripe down the spine (or did I get that the wrong way around??) they live in salt marshes, heathland and dunes, so have a look when your on your hols.
 
Nothing like the ones Ive seen, but they do vary a lot.

Like all amphibians for that matter
 
Lots of variation, have seen yellow, red and orange Common Frogs.
 
Michael Watson said:
Its THREE frogs ,two male one female, the males are clamping onto the female (amplexus), quite common when spawning, seen this sort of thing myself. Nothing Fortean about it at all. Repeat THREE frogs.:blah:
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Not saying you're wrong, Michael, but have you got a source for this?
 
My theory is that Froggy [digression]I think this is a silly unoriginal name I would have called him/her/it 'Godfry' as in God! 3 :eek:, just a thought [/digression]

oh where was I.. on yes.. my theory is that the frog is a mutant that escaped the lab of a nearby mad scientist. It didnt escape it was either reclaimed by the scientist or due to the instability of its experimental cell structure it just went 'pop!' :splat:

Stranger things that that happen round here.
 
Evilsprout said:
Not saying you're wrong, Michael, but have you got a source for this?
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Look at the photo, it's very obviously three.
 
There's another three headed frog link, posted by demonix, at:

forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13941&highlight=frog
local6.com/news/2900371/detail.html
Links are dead.

Some of the pictures on this look quite odd, there doesn't seem to be enough bits for three complete frogs.
 
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Michael Watson said:
Look at the photo, it's very obviously three.
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So your assertion is based wholly on your analysis of the photo? To be honest from that pic it could well be three randy frogs huddled together, but on the TV news and the pics in Timble's it looks conjoined.

And randy frogs show up all the time without people assuming they're conjoined? And the mating frogs theory was presumed by eyewitnesses until further inspection. Although it wouldn't be the first time a Fortean story's made out of something ridiculously mundane, I don't think we can dismiss this one quite so easily.
 
Timble said:
There's another three headed frog link, posted by demonix, at:

forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13941&highlight=frog

local6.com/news/2900371/detail.html
Links are dead.

Some of the pictures on this look quite odd, there doesn't seem to be enough bits for three complete frogs.
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Yep the first 3 pictures of the slideshow:

local6.com/slideshow/news/2900374/detail.html?qs=1&s=1&dm=ss&p=news
Link is dead. No archived version found.

do appear to show that they are all fused together - I think we need to find the frog its not like it looks like it can move very fast.
 
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It seems very unlikely it hopped off to me, being a big ball of frogs and all that, I'd go with the theory someone may have stole it. If real it must be worth something, unless it's some pollutor spiriting away evidence of genetic problems with the local fauna!
 
Looking at the photo's it's quite plain to see that this is THREE frogs of the speices Rana temporaria The Common Frog, which happen to mate this time of year, not at all uncommon for them to form writhing balls of frogs ,where the males grab hold of females(they have special rough patches on their front legs to grip with), have seen them like this.It is very difficult to seperate them when like this. The number of frogs in the photo's is not one, its not two, its not four or more, itsTHREE . The only thing Fortean about this is what Emporer said about it!.Just to re-cap itsTHREE frogs.The fact that it has "disapeared" is probably that all THREE have seperated and either escaped or someone did not want a very red face!.I now not just rest my case but hurl it with great force!:rolleyes: Did I mention that its three frogs in ampluxus?. Just checking.
 
Frog (s)porn

MW: Sorry I think I missed that - how many? :p

Would i be possible to find some pictures showing this for comparison? It does look like they are fused together but that might just be the effect of the photographs, etc.. I do hope we aren't getting into the realms of frog's porn!! ;)

Emps
 
Re: Frog (s)porn

Emperor said:
Would i be possible to find some pictures showing this for comparison?
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I did a quick Google image search:

images.google.com/images?q=amplexus+frog

and found some examples (usually caveats apply ;) ):

Its only clear where one starts and the other ends because they are different species - I'd imagine with more slime, etc. that the joins might be tricky to see):

donb.furfly.net/photo_cd/g/b53.html

Same again but it is colour differenes that hel here:

livingunderworld.org/gallery/photos/anura/rhacophoridae/rhacophorus/reinwardtii/

And the same here:

http://members.optushome.com.au/awnelson/davidavid/smith0203/lchloris1.jpg

Similar and uniformly-coloured examples:

ranadorada.org/captivity.htm
audubon.org/local/sanctuary/sharon/pages/amphibians.htm

Emps
 
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It quite possibly could be of course, all I'm saying is (especially in the photos on Timble's post) it looks very conjoined. And surely the experts called in wouldn't go "wow it's amazing, it's a three-headed frog" they'd just go "randy frogs" and walk off?! (I'm very aware of the press manipulating experts and making a story out of nowt though...)

Look very very carefully at the close up pictures and tell us it doesn't look very very wrong for a mere huddle of horny amphibians getting it on....

Like I say you may be right, Michael, I don't think your case can be closed let alone hurled just yet however :D
 
Credit where its due...

To give credit where it's due it was demonix who spotted the item with the extra pictures, I just linked to their thread.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't say whether it's one frog or three just commented that it looks very, very odd.

I supposed it /they could've croaked....
 
la la la laa la.
ps, my little green brassica'd chum, you ARE Robert Rankin, and I claim my £5:D ,which explains your absences from he MB, nocking out novels I suspect.
 
wish it was that... I'd probably be a bit richer. Never got into Rankin, always looked a bit too silly.
 
Evilsprout said:
wish it was that... I'd probably be a bit richer. Never got into Rankin, always looked a bit too silly.
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Hmmm, how come the sprout ,sig, and the writing style is similar?
 
The name's something I came up with years ago and became my web persona, my sig's from The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser and my writing style's just, um, me I'm afraid :D
 
Lillith said:
Theres a breed of frog that somehow gets it's eggs onto it's back and then grows it's skin around them.
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This is the Surinam toad. The way the eggs get onto the female's back is quite amazing- during mating, the pair perfom 'somersaults' in the water- at the top of the turn, the female lays an egg, and it lands on her back when they reach the bottom again.

Back on the main subject- having seen hundreds of frog breeding aggregations, I'd agree 100% with Michael- it's three frogs.

It is incredibly hard to separate frogs in amplexus. Because the females are so slippery, the males have very rough 'nuptial pads' on their hands, and an unbelievably strong grip. This means that the male's arms and hands can be pressed very deeply into the skin of the female. If there were any photos of the underside of these frogs, the hands of the two males would almost certainly be visible.

Some professional herpetologists have commented on it here:
http://www.herpetofauna.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=528&PN=1
 
Damn! I'm starting to be convinced that it's not actually the cerberus of frogs after all!
 
What I want to know is how they decided it was a three headed frog as opposed to three frogs sharing one body?
 
If you look at this photo, it looks like there's algae (blanketweed or similar) on them, which might have obscured the "joins" between the individual frogs. Michael was spot on right from the start - it's 3 frogs in amplexus.
 
Maybe it was easier to explain to the nursery kids it was a three-headed mutant, and not two randy sex-crazed frogs latching on to a female and ready to spunk all over her eggs as soon as they're laid... and from there is snowballed.
 
Sorry to join the discussion late, but I've been waiting for my account to activate. I agree absolutely with Michael and the others saying that it's multiple amplexus (a.k.a. a mating ball) and have been putting a page together on this three-headed frog saga. I found this image of a mating ball of toads with two males clasping one female (obvious relevance) as well as a very similar Massachusetts newspaper story about a two-headed toad that was really a mating pair. Exactly the same mix: scared child, baffled adults, dark theories about pollution. I think Emperor is right; it is very Fortean in the way this story has spread, via newspapers worldwide, apparently with zero critical analysis. Maybe it's such a tempting story that the newspapers are cherry-picking their experts to find ones who won't just come out and say it's garbage? I don't know. There are 'deeps' to it; three-headed creatures are very mythological, and monstrous births have commonly been taken as omens.
 
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