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Writer's pictureDan Short

A Frog's Life

Updated: May 13, 2020

We took our one day off for the week. We went for a swim in the waterfall. I spotted a tapir print on the trail on the way down. Each print was about ten inches across. It had one big rounded triangular heel and three toes, sometimes four in soft mud. It was the first time that I’d seen one but I knew nothing else could have created something of that size. The tracks followed the trail all the way to the waterfall. It obviously makes for an easier route for animals to take. The tapir tracks were even on the river bank when I went to take some shots of the tadpoles that lined the river. The prints, along with what I think were coati prints, led straight towards the opening and appeared to go both in and out of the trail, all the way back down to the station again. This was irrefutable truth I was, at the very least, looking in the right area and gave me some hope actually spotting something. I found a nice ridge on the other side of the river partly covered by leaves that would suffice as a hiding place.


I returned to the bank in the evening with my camera to get some shots of the cane toads and frogs. I’d also heard that many species of snakes come down to the rivers to feed on the frogs and their eggs because this is when the frogs are both most vulnerable and found in abundance. I silently hoped that this was something I’d be able to see and capture but I didn’t keep my hopes. Oddly, there were none in the area where we had seen hundreds the night before. I walked back up the river, past the entrance to the station. I found some but there were nowhere near the sort of numbers as before. The sound, however, was still quite profound. The sound the tree frogs made was otherworldly. It travelled along the river and then back again as if it bounced back. Again, the smaller males sat at the water edge croaking while the larger females lay idle, probably depositing their eggs. The fact that most didn’t even flinch at the sight of me walking past them closely exemplified just how vulnerable to predation they were.


There were thousands upon thousands of flying insects above the river. I directed my head torch into the trees above me but couldn't see a single leaf through the swarms of insects. As astonishing as it was, it made wearing the head torch as intended, on my head, utterly torturous. Three or four insects per second flew into my mouth, nose, ears and eyes. One insect in particular, about an inch across and must have been a beetle, was especially annoying. It had an incredibly deep flying noise and genuinely hurt when it flew into my face. I resorted to holding the head torch in my hand. This stopped the problem of the insects altogether and made for a more easily adjustable source of light for filming but it meant that locating the subject and making sure the camera was on the subject laborious, especially if it was moving. With one hand, I tried to keep the subject illuminated with the torch while trying to find it with my camera in the black void of the night with the other. Focusing on either one meant I lost track of the other making the whole process very stressful.


Nonetheless, I made my way up the river. I was filming one male cane toad croaking in a an attempt to attract females. Almost instantaneously it attracted a female. The male then sat happily on top of the female’s back for well over twenty minutes. Occasionally, the female swam along with the male looking half asleep latched onto its back to find a more sheltered spot. While filming one of the small green frogs in the water, I heard an almighty squeal. My first instinct was that it must have been some sort of mouse. I turned around to see the white underbelly of a snake as it lifted one of the green tree frogs, with its legs spread as far apart as possible, vertically into the air out of the rocks. Even at that point I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing as it happened so quickly. I grabbed my camera and tripod and scuttled over to start filming. By this point the snake had made its way behind a tree stump where it mesmerisingly twisted and contorted its entire body as it waited for it venom to take its toll of the frog. I could tell by the brown blotches that joined together to make a wavy zigzag along the top of it back, that it was a northern cat-eyed snake. Though the cat eyed snake is only mildly venomous, to frogs it is lethal. It wasn’t long before the venom had taken its effect, the frog was dead and the snake could release its grip.


While I was still focused on the hind of its body on top of the stump, the snake’s head appeared from underneath with the frog and I needed to change positions. At this point I was kneeling in the water, sweating profusely trying to balance the tripod on the slippery uneven rocks in time to get the shot, all while making sure I didn’t lose sight of the snake. With the frog no longer moving, it swallowed it, bit by bit. It took about 4 minutes in total to swallow it enough so it could be on the move again. It gave one final push against the branch on which it was resting, forcing the frog further down into its stomach. Then it calmly slithered off into the bushes, passing tailwhip scorpion as it left. After that remarkable experience, I got a few more shots of the frogs mating. Filming just the frogs seemed very underwhelming considering what I’d just witnessed but I persisted until my battery finally died and I went back inside ellated.



As emotional and empathetic beings, it's easy for us to start feeling sorry for the frog, especially when looking back over the the quite graphic footage. But it’s a key part of the life cycle I wanted to convey. The frogs come to the river in their hundreds and thousands, producing multitudes more offspring. In doing so, they become an easy target. The cat eyed snake, which is mostly arboreal and eats both adults frogs and their eggs, made its way down from the dense jungle, to where its food source at this time of year is both in abundance and most vulnerable. The result is that a few are predated on by species that depend on them to live, more frogs survive than die and live long enough to reproduce. Thus the cycle reproduces itself.

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