Curiosity 86: Frog calls

Another FB finding! This one is via a "friend," David Hillis, who lives on a ranch in Texas and raises longhorn cattle. He is also a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas. You can read about him in this NewYork Times profile. I love following him because very often he posts some fascinating morsel about biology (phylogeny, vertebrate systematics), natural history (he is the author recently of a book on biodiversity in the Texas Hill Country), or, lately, electric vehicles. 

And yesterday he posted this: "Here's a great discussion of the history and impact of one of my favorite audio albums of all time. It was originally released in 1958, but it is so popular and enduring that it has recently been re-released by Folkways Records. Read the story to learn how it was critical for my own mating success" (yeah, he talks like that—but in this case, it's for real: he is featured in the article)—with a link to an AtlasObscura article, "The Many Lives of 'Sounds of North American Frogs.'"

Which of course I clicked on, because we have frogs—the Pacific tree frog (Pseudacris regilla)—and I love their singing, which is happening right now: it's their glory time! And there's a whole record of frog sounds? Well, how wonderful!

The post got lots of amusing comments:

I used to invite women to my room to see my tropical fish. (I maintained a strain of fancy guppies and another of black mollies for years.) The ploy worked more often than not, and I have a wife of 48 years as proof. 😍

To which David responded, "Another in the series of how we dated before the internet!"

I have a copy [of Sounds of North American Frogs] on cassette that I bought in the early 90's. I was fresh out of college and working at the Smithsonian. My "desk" was in the "sound lab" where they digitized frog and bird calls (I wasn't working on anything auditory, there was just space in there for a kid). Met some very interesting scientists and got to hear even more interesting bird calls. I'll never forget there was one scientist who studied the calls of tropical owls. He was a WWII vet and cussed like a sailor. It was the first time I met an "educated" person who swore like a working man.

I dated an ecologist for a while. He loved to show me videos he had collect of amphibians and insects having sex. I sure learned a lot about amphibian and insect sex 😂 He would fill my place with little bottles with wildflowers in them and sage from when he was out in the field at the Audubon preserve. Wonderful wooing smells. Is this the way field ecologists lek?

There was another one called, “Voices of the Night” that my Herpetology professor, Anthony Gaudin, played during lab while we were doing a dissection. While we were all working quietly, the track for Hyla avivoca came on, and I immediately blurted out, “it’s THEM!” It seems that the makers of my favorite science fiction movie of 1954 used that track for the sounds made by the giant ants!

I put tracks from this on EVERY mixtape I made for girls, back in the day.

 Here is the album cover:

And if you go to the link (just click on the lefthand numbers) you will be treated to an encyclopedic recital by such creatures as the barking, squirrel, and pine woods treefrogs (all Hyla spp. on the album, though things have changed since the 1950s nomenclature-wise), the southern leopard, Florida gopher, and pig frogs (Rana spp.), or the red-spotted, southwestern Woodhouse's, or Sonoran desert toads (Bufo spp.)—and many more. Sometimes there are duets, and even multi-species choruses! All accompanied by droll and learned commentary by Charles M. Bogert, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (As the article puts it, Bogert "pursued accuracy rather than vibes.") I gather the album is also available on Spotify, if you'd like to simply play through.

I wasn't sure I had anything to say about this, but the album sat there in an open tab, and I didn't want to lose track of it. What better way to keep it in my memory than to write about it here? And look! I did have something to say. 

Here are a few of the amphibians that are featured on the album (though their scientific names have changed a bit thanks to the efforts of developmental biologists such as Hillis):

Boreal toad (Anaxyrus boreas)

Pickerel frog (Lythobates palustris)

Squirrel treefrog (Hyla squirella)

I'm sure I could find a poem about frogs or toads if I looked—since that seems to be my pattern lately—for today, I'll just leave this at that. Ribbit.