Nature entertainment is the result of much research TV nature shows, colorful Web sites about plants and animals, and slick natural history magazines provide many intriguing messages about the complexity of the environment and how fascinating the natural world is. The case of the Jamaican frog serves as a typical example of how an ecological fact might enter the world of entertainment. The bizarre behavior of this poorly studied species was originally described in the scientific journal Copeia by investigators from the University of the West Indies in Kingston.
Animal behavior defies our imagination.
A decade ago, no one was aware that an animal existed in which the female lays her eggs deep in a cave, attends them for a month, and then carries the babies out of the cave on her back. The phenomenon was not mentioned in encyclopedias, textbooks, or nature magazines. The behavior of the Jamaican frog in a cave in the West Indies was still to be discovered by science. Frogs do some weird things reproductively, such as carrying their developing babies in their mouth or on their back. Some tropical frogs lay their eggs on leaves above the water, and upon hatching, the young fall into the water below as tadpoles.