I feel bad for the beetle in this experiment. It must have spent a lot of its energy reserve to emerge out of the frog, probably to have been swallowed again.

Well the one where they immobilized the legs just got eaten, so... yeah.

The photos of the escape make me imagine the world's strangest motivational "hang in there" type of poster.

"Never say Never!" "There is no try, only do"

"There is no try, only doo doo"

I think they should rename the insect to the "Andy Dufresne Beetle" -- the escape totally reminds me of Shawshank Redemption.

One must imagine the beetle happy

Duster — Me And The Birds starts playing

"probably to have been swallowed again"

Likely not. Animal trials are usually one use, to get the best data. And the animals in use get usually killed afterwards anyway. If you like animals, you probably do not want to learn too many details about it all.

This depends, I used to work at a biotech company and when the dogs there were retired from their trial, the employees would typically "adopt" them and try and give them another good couple of months.

They usually didn't make it very long but it's something. This was dogs though, so advanced stages of the trial, early stage vermin definitely didn't get the same treatment.

Side story: I did IT there and could access just about any building on campus, but whenever I had to go to the animal testing building to do whatever maintenance it was, I had a security guard escort and loom over me wherever I went. From what I was told they had an animal rights group infiltrate and attempt to release all of the animals a couple of years before.

In the 1980s, Skinny Puppy was a popular band in the clubs and my social circles. Animal welfare was a real issue already. I purchased this album that was a fundraiser for the Animal Liberation Front, and really, my main takeaway from this smash hit song would be the horrors of Thalidomide and its devastating effects on the poor children and childbearing/pregnant mothers, in countries where the drug factories really didn't care about safety or humans or animals (I suppose that describes all of them).

https://youtu.be/bVnVcbuoyWU

I can believe that.

I went to a vegan restaurant once and met some randoms in London, I think it was a meetup.com thing. And one lady was telling me how she would happily take a lead pipe and hurt people working in animal testing.

I was shocked that someone would would share their violent ideals with a total stranger. I mean I could have been an undercover policeman or something...

And just to be clear, I definitely don't think hurting humans is a good idea.

"I mean I could have been an undercover policeman or something..."

If the police wanted to bust people hypothetically threatening other people with violence, they just have to look on social media a bit. But as far as I know, a vague hypothetical threat like this, would probably be dismissed by a court. I rather know, that there are many people walking freely around who do make not cague, but concrete threats to concrete people and the police usually says, they cannot do anything.

UK police has a multiple decades long history of infiltration of animal rights groups, though. They likely wouldn't try to act on a non-specific threat like that, because you're right it probably would get dismissed, but it's the kind of thing that certainly could trigger unwanted attention.

Especially would think someone with those kinds of views would be aware of the rather well publicised sordid history of UK police with infiltrating animal rights groups and been more cautious. Unless she was an undercover cop out fishing (I don't think it's likely, but who knows).

This was around 15 years ago, so maybe before the big recent stories about undercover-cops fathering children with their marks and vanishing etc.

I got the impression this lady I met was a little un-hinged / manic. Although more than capable of causing harassment to those unlucky to be in her path.

If you truly like animals, you probably want to learn all about it and see what you can do to stop it.

Sounds like the bug is the consumer and the frog is capitalism to me. Aesop fable?

There is a version of beetle that incapacitates the frog's legs and eats it slowly while it is immobilized. Nature is metal.

> were able to make the trip in a minimum time of six minutes. (The longest journey took about four hours, per Wired.)

Between 6 and 240 minutes... How come such a wild range? Some take time sightseeing?

If you had ever watched the documentary, you'd know that Lemmiwinks must overcome many obstacles and trials to escape.

The Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell must be proud.

If Lemmiwinks was one of these beetles he'd have simply turned around and gone out the same way he went in xD

The eventual Lemmiwinks/Wikileaks thing was freaking genius

If you get turned around and try to head in the wrong direction you just aren't going to make any headway.

Because when he's turning around, he's making his way to the head.

I would imagine it also has something to do with their relative sizes, and how full the frogs digestive system was at the start.

Gives a nice mental image for "digging through shit". _Literally!_

Experience. For some it's the third time.

A talent I have always personally wished to have, but never succeeded in.

Speak for yourself, this is my greatest skill

> Speak for yourself

He very clearly did.

Have you tried?

This is why you chew your food.

Most frogs don't have teeth though.

I get this is a joke, but just bouncing off: don't humans mainly need to chew food because we have a terrible design and evolution put our lifeline of air intake in a tiny hole behind a flap right where we swallow food in a small, relatively inflexible tube and location?

No. It's true that other animals don't have the difficulty with choking on food that we do. But it's not true that other animals don't chew their food. You chew your food to make it easier to digest and so that it will fit down your throat.

And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.

Quite a few animals chew their food multiple times for more effective digestion - cows for example. Plant fibers are notoriously hard to break down. Horses don’t and if you compare the digestion results, you’ll see a significant difference between horse dung and cow dung.

Besides the ruminants, there are also other animals, the best known being the rabbits, which are not able to reverse the direction of the food to bring it back from the stomach into the mouth, so after a one-way passage of the food through their bodies they must eat it again, to chew it for the second time.

Yeah. Horses are so inefficient at digestion that the largest breeds (such as Clydesdales) would starve to death in huge fields of grass. They can only survive by being fed copious amounts of grain such as oats.

Hmm. Do you have a reference for that? From what I have read, Clydesdales are fine on good pasture (hay in the winter), but they won't be able to do much if any work if they don't get additional feed. They would also likely not be as muscled as a horse with supplemental feed. A clydesdale raised on pasture only might also end up smaller, but they won't starve to death, assuming it is quality pasture.

I'm talking about a large breed raised on grain and then suddenly switched to pasture -- not one raised on pasture its whole life -- as you might see with a retired working animal. They may not literally starve to death, but they will lose a lot of muscle mass and may get sick and die from that, or may struggle to survive the winter.

Given a sample size of my dog, I believe chewing is only necessary for making bland food more delicious. The more yummy the food, the less my dog chews it - thoroughly chewing dry kibble and culminating in literally inhaling something like roast chicken.

Thus, it's because grass and weeds are bland and lacking in tasty fat that bovines and ruminants chew their food for so long and so many times.

Not really, no.

Carnivores vs. herbivores.

Also, it depends if something eats leaves (not very digestible, not very nourishing) vs fruit (very digestible, except the seeds, and highly nourishing).

Carnivores don't need to chew much.

Carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores.

Cows and animals alike (ruminant) basically chew all day and they bring the food back from the stomach to chew it again. Otherwise they cannot get enough nutrients out of gras and co.

> But it's not true that other animals don't chew their food.

I didn't say that.

If you claim that humans chew their food because their throats are uniquely vulnerable to choking, you have also claimed that animals without such awkward throats don't need to chew their food.

Putting things another way, just a few minutes of observation are sufficient to demonstrate that running the air intake past the esophagus is so irrelevant to the purpose of chewing that the absence of that problem does not affect the behavior in any way.

Isn’t that logic in reverse?

No. The two claims are contrapositives of each other:

1. Chewing -> bad throat

2. Good throat -> no chewing

Bad throat -> chewing required.

Good throat -> chewing not required for that reason but possibly for other reason.

Chewing -> bad throat possible, but not required.

Not chewing -> bad throat badge not unlocked.

> If you claim that humans chew their food because their throats are uniquely vulnerable to choking, you have also claimed that animals without such awkward throats don't need to chew their food.

No, I haven't. That quite simply does not follow, at all. There is to much variation in the definitions and permutations of chewing, throat design, air intake design, types of foods eaten, and digestive systems to make that leap.

>And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.

For most animals, this is true I think. But frogs seem to be perfectly happy swallowing live prey whole. You can see videos of frogs eating live mice!

No. It's actually important for an effective digestion. Not just because smaller pieces are easier to break down, but because the enzymes in the saliva start the process.

Digestion is important but I think being able to breath is more important. Poor digestion won't kill you as readily as suffocation or pneumonia from aspiration. They, being protecting food from blocking or entering the trachea and digestion, both seem pretty important as part of the whole chewing system, so I don't think it's a plain "No". I should correct my original comment from mainly to one of the main reasons.

Do you know how snakes "eat"?

Chickens have no teeth, but they chew their food (the food is first stored in their crop, along with gravel, where it is "chewed" before passing to the stomach.)

Well, sort of, it's the gizzard that "chews" it, not the crop.

What does that have to do with humans?

breath /breθ/ -- noun: air that is drawn in and out.

breathe /briːð/ -- verb: the act of inhaling and exhaling for the purposes of respiration.

They are not the same word and they do not sound the same.

typo noun ty· po ˈtī-(ˌ)pō plural typos : an error (as of spelling) in typed or typeset material

--------

I know what the words mean.

Absolutely. But at least we (and all other animals with a secondary palate) can chew while breathing. I heard that before that has evolved it put a severe caloric disadvantage on the animals since one was limited in how much chewing can happen by the need to breath.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_palate#Evolution

> But at least we (and all other animals with a secondary palate) can chew while breathing

Interestingly, sprint predators such as cheetahs have to pause to get their breath back after a fast chase before they can eat their prey. In contrast, raptors such as falcons can eat immediately after a kill because they don't get out of breath in the same way. The avian respiratory system is actually quite different to ours, with relatively rigid lungs, separate air sacs to pump the air, and a one-way flow through the lungs, in contrast to mammalian lungs where the air goes in and out through the same pipe, and the lungs act as bellows as well as gas transfer devices.

I fail to see how we represent terrible design. Most animals our size need to chew food with their mouth, and of them I can't think of any more successful than us, evolutionary speaking.

The fact that our species is successful doesn't mean that every mechanism in our bodies is good. There are a lot of "design decisions" which could have been improved if they had gone through a review, rather than evolution.

One such example is the way our retinas are wired to the optic nerve on the inside of the eye, rather than behind, causing us to have a "blind spot" where the nerve fibres need to go back. In some other animals, particularly the octopus, the retina is wired the "right way", such that they don't have a blind spot.

Same for the design of our pharynx, larynx and esophagus. As mentioned in sibling comments, other animals suffer from choking much less, as compared to humans, where we have ~5k deaths/year from choking just in the US [0].

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-to-cho...

Nor does it mean it is terrible. That is the kind of exaggregation I reacted on.

I guess you feel it's an exaggeration, but how? We put physical filters in front of basically anything we build that takes in air for the exact reason of it's bad to take in anything other than air for systems that only expect air.

Choking kills thousands of people every year and is the fourth leading cause in children under 5. According to this article (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099619/), aspirated pneumonia is even worse, especially for older people, who guess what, can't chew well.

And it's all due to the (apparently not terrible) design.

In order for you to subjectively label it terrible you need to present a bad outcome from the design. Evolutionary/objectively, it's not a bad design.

How do you define and measure evolutionary "success"? By what mechanisms is it achieved?

For a cross-species comparison, you'd usually measure evolutionary success in terms of biomass. More is better.

You don't. It is not even agreed upon that evolution optimizes <<something>>.

And even if you agree that evolution is an optimization process, attempts to define its objective function run into problems with tautology and circular definitions once you move beyond simple examples.

It is described by Dawkins et al.

More successful == gets to have more surviving offspring.

That is the TL;DR. He, she or it that has the most babies, wins.

I think we have to know the order in which these features occurred. As others pointed out, chewing has other benefits. Maybe evolution took advantage of chewing to change the air intake design for some other advantage.

I thought of this, as it could also be the other way around. As in, hey this food is already chewed because of the air intake design, resources can be allocated elsewhere instead of spending them on digesting. Or it developed completely differently I'm actually curious as to what the guesstimated order is.

Humans don't need to chew their food at all. If there is enough moisture, you can swallow most foods whole in chunks. Chewing is part of the digestive process (especially for plant material) to increase the surface area of the food. Even carnivores with huge throats and few or no molars can be observed chewing certain foods.

This is such an interesting read. I’m wondering if this behavior is only observed between this Japanese frog and beetle, or perhaps it’s spread throughout nature.

From the article

"He found that the beetles had similarly high success rates with four other frog species....

"When swallowed, other similar water beetles were killed and digested by the frog...."

> covered in feces, but otherwise active and seemingly healthy

The accuracy and level of detail makes me speechless.

Then again, I saw the title and continued reading, so I knew what I was getting into.

At least I have more vocabulary for when my dog rolls in something on a walk.

Yes, "my dog is covered in feces" does sound more elegant than "my dog just rolled in sh*t" - but how you articulate it doesn't improve the situation if the dog in question is sitting next to you...

…but otherwise active and seemingly healthy!

A hilarious non-sequitur for the dog scenario.

Our feral cat only rolled in high quality horse shit. He was very particular, as well as proud of his smelliness.

How does it breathe in there?

It's a water beetle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_beetle), that probably helps.

I see a real benefit to the beetle, if it can get out. But I'm wondering, is there any benefit to the frog from consuming this type of "fiber"?

Interesting. Free colon cleanse. Now we just need to find the beetle species that can perform the same feat in humans.

Maybe the same beetle would work. Has anyone tried?

A human has a much longer gut.

Sure though the deadliest part, the stomach, is not that long.

Granted, but I'm thinking more about how long the beetle can survive without access to air.

That's an aquatic beetle, a lot of those store their own air supply under their wings...

Oh, I didn't know that! I can't get to the citation, but per Wikipedia [1] Hydrophilidae, the family in which this beetle is classified, do have that capability. Whether even with an air bubble they can hold out long enough is a separate question, as is whether their also-mentioned ability to extract usable oxygen from ambient water would be helpful in this environment - but being able to carry air under their elytra would certainly improve their odds.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophilidae

I guess you've never eaten boiled corn grains

Have you ever had an itch that you just can't reach?

This beats every post Ive seen on Reddit's r/prolifetip.

"Well, you wouldn't shit me now, would you?"

(Sorry, it's the oh-so-appropriate punch line from a joke in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).)

Whoever wrote this is genius, how many times in your career do you get the opportunity to write this stuff. So many amazing quotes in this article, I’m dying. 10/10 would read again.

OMG, this detail -- it itches already:

> Sugiura suspects that the beetles also use their legs to stimulate the frog’s cloacal sphincter, causing it to defecate. However, he’ll need to run more tests to be sure...

I like how the diagram is captioned "A hypothetical escape route ..." as if the frog's gut were a cave system with different potential passageways and not a single path out

definite Ig Nobel Prize candidate

Inspiration for this ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-pDUO-epfg

Reminds me of the German poem "Storch und Schleiche" [1] (LLM translation):

  A stork once strolled by the pond's edge,
  where he spotted a blind slow-worm, a hedge.
  The stork exclaimed, "Oh, this is quite grand!"
  and devoured it, all, without a reprimand.

  The slow-worm lay in the stork's belly,
  and both found this situation rather smelly.
  The blind slow-worm then spoke with dismay,
  "Such horror!" and slipped through the back door away.

  The stork, vexed by this unhappy twist,
  couldn't believe he'd let the slow-worm persist.
  So, without hesitation or delay,
  he ate the slow-worm again the same way.

  He cleverly wedged the back door tight,
  so the blind slow-worm could not escape his sight.
  The stork called in, with a cunning tone:
  "Well, if you can, try escaping on your own!"

  The sly slow-worm found the front door clear,
  and promptly made his escape with no fear.
  But the stork, filled with anger and spite,
  ate the slow-worm once more, sealing his plight.

  In a crafty invention, the stork's mind did revel,
  he connected both doors to secure his prey well.
  Then, addressing the slow-worm inside without fail,
  "Now get ready for a round trip, without fail!"

[1] https://www.schwaben-kultur.de/home/stat/larchiv/447.html

Inspiration for The Human Centipede?

Ze Frank is probably working on his doc about this right now.

So, the whole journey of the beetle be like: f(x)=x

You left off a term: F(x) = x + S

This feels like a perfect metaphor for my career to date...

The beetle crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can't even imagine. Or maybe I just don't want to. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. I guess it comes down to a simple choice. Get busy living or get busy dying.

Impossible not to read in Morgan Freeman's voice. This might be the best comment I have ever seen on HN. Thank you.

Thanks! This beetle reminded me of Andy Dufresne as well! What a champion of survival this little creature is!

That person was also referenced in the videogame Trover Saves the Universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtiqS1l_SbM Very NSFW language.

Hilarious, foul and disgusting coprophilia .. "back magic".

For anyone wondering apparently this is a play on a quote from Shawshank Redemption, (I've never seen the movie!)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/characters/nm0000151

Dude put down whatever you are doing and watch that movie right now!

Why!

Because it’s a friggin’ masterpiece, that’s why.

I've watched a fair number of movies (100's, maybe even 1000+), that one easily sits in my top 20. Definitely recommended. And afterwards, the Count of Monte Cristo...

Topologically, the beetle was never inside the frog.

The beetle fell into a hole and came out the otherside.

Same side. The frog can be modelled as a torus for purposes of this beetle's navigation.

Well then, we're all just talking donuts that absolutely ruin perfectly good food.

Surely this is the humor behind the "spherical cow" [1] metaphor for scientific oversimplification. Obviously a real cow isn't a sphere. It's a torus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

Thanks for sharing this.

I tried..https://colasocialsecurity.info/

When you're going through hell, keep going

What’s the point of escaping when you are going to be swallowed again? (I think that frog ate it after, but the video cut before that)

Free waterslide

“According to a Kobe University statement, this study marks the first time that researchers have witnessed prey quickly and actively escape the body of its predator after being eaten.”

I present my favorite video of the rough-skinned newt “actively escaping” from a bullfrog’s body after being eaten:

https://youtu.be/kvBi5Wv8-qg?t=99

Unintentional spelunking by a beetle

It makes me wonder what other living organisms are able to defeat the digestive tract and continue living once it is expelled out of the host. There has to be a name for this phenomenon.

"grad school"