Hmm. Yesterday it was hagfish slime. Today it’s frog spit. The LA Times reports that it’s their saliva that enables frogs to catch bugs with their tongues:
Sticky frog saliva is a non-Newtonian fluid. That means it can behave as both a liquid and a solid.
[…]
A good example of a non-Newtonian fluid is the corn starch and water mixture known as oobleck or moon mud, said study leader Alexis Noel, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. If you jiggle it around in a cup, it flows like a liquid. But if you press down on it, it turns solid.
Frog saliva behaves in the opposite way. When the slobbery tongue smacks its prey, the saliva becomes more liquid and spreads into all the cracks and crevices of its prey.
As the frog retracts its tongue, the saliva thickens, making it harder for the prey to separate from the tongue. (Imagine trying to pull apart fingers stuck together with peanut butter, Noel said.)
Combine their stretchy tongues with their sticky spit and it explains how frogs can do what they do. Isn’t nature wonderful?
You can’t say you don’t get an education here at The Glittering Eye.
Good place to start research on COPD.
I think you should go for a good poo article tomorrow to score the trifecta!
Steve
I think I have a stack of those sitting around somewhere.
Reminds me of a game my wife and I used to play when she came home from work in the evening: “Name That Bodily Fluid”.
There was a great piece on this on today’s NPR broadcast of “science friday.” Pretty cool stuff.
The poor journalism major got it screwed up until paragraph 3. Skipping the tensor analysis lingo, the viscosity of non-Newtonian fluids increases >> than linearly with increasingg velocity of shear stress. (It doesn’t really behave like a solid) So said frog flicks it’s prey and quickly withdraws the tongue, making the saliva more “sticky” as the frog accelerates its prey, and the poor fly or insect or whatever is stuck and, well, screwed. Pretty cool evolution.
This is basic fluid mechanics. Nice to know for any of you chemical engineers spending this evening designing piping systems.
In case you were wondering, poo is Newtonian. But you are all invited to do your own experimentation……….
We just better names for these future important industrial and commercial products. Remember, no one could stomach the lowly “horse mackerel” until it became T*U*N*A.