April 29, 2005
New Delicacy, Exploding Frog Foi Grois?

I don’t think you'll find it on even the trendiest of menus but apparently German crows have developed a taste for frog livers. Interestingly, they may have developed a technique for extracting just their favorite morsel from a frog, often leaving the newly de-livered amphibians intact enough to live, now bloated and leaking organs, for several minutes.

While the gory scenes this phenomenon is leaving must be disturbing, and messy, I find the rapid spread of this very specific learned behavior fascinating. They have no formal communication system, and yet, there are already reports of similar happening in nearby Denmark. If one of these precise peckers crosses the Atlantic, things could get messy around here.

Posted by j.d.ashcraft to Science and Nature at 10:50AM on Apr 29, 2005