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As a SciShow viewer, you can  keep building your STEM skills for 20% off an annual premium  subscription at Brilliant.org/SciShow. [ intro ] If you wasted some time in  the 80s playing Frogger, you might have been left with the impression  that frogs just aren't that tough. After all, if falling off a log can be fatal there would seem to be little hope for survival outside the ponds and streams  they’re often associated with.

But real frogs, not computer game ones, have been around for 250 million years, and they have adapted to survive  almost everywhere on the planet. Here are just a few of the  wildest places that frogs live, all of which take a lot more fortitude  than little Frogger ever had. Northern leopard frogs can be  found throughout North America, from parts of Canada all the way to New Mexico.

You might have surmised that the northern  reaches of that range have much colder winters than those in the south. So how do the northern-most of the  northern leopard frogs survive that cold? Well back in 1972, scientists discovered some leopard  frogs overwintering in a frozen pond about 50 km north of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

To survive the cold, the frogs  were hibernating under the ice. But because hibernating frogs  are easy prey for predators, the frogs also needed a safe  place to wait out the season. They were hibernating in what  researchers called hibernation pits.

The frogs covered the pits —  and themselves — with silt. That helped camouflage them  from predators like trout, which remain active during the winter. But there’s still one problem  that these frogs had to solve: Getting oxygen at the bottom of a lake.

You see, frogs have two  ways they can absorb oxygen. They have lungs and breathe oxygen like we do, but they also get oxygen  through epidermal breathing, or the ability to take in oxygen through the skin. Since frogs can’t use their lungs underwater, these leopard frogs definitely  have to go with option B here.

But because there’s not enough oxygen  available under the layers of silt, it means they need to leave a gap in  the protective layer to let fresh,   oxygen rich water back in. They also maintain some slow  movement throughout the cold season, to help flush out some of the silt  so they can get needed oxygen. All that means they can remain cozy and  mostly hidden throughout the winter.

Probably not especially warm, though. Now it’s a fact of life that every  living thing needs water to survive. But frogs don’t just need to drink water.

Their skin needs to stay moist, too, which is why  they often live near water sources like ponds. However, there are some frogs  that can survive in dry places where there is no ground water visible at all. Take for example, the desert rain frog.

It lives in South Africa and  kind of looks like Grumpy Cat if you stuffed her in a hamster ball. As its name implies, desert rain  frogs are found in the desert. But the word “rain” isn’t exactly accurate.

These frogs’ main source of water is not rain. On average, their habitat only gets  between 100 and 200 mm of rain in a year, most of it in the winter. So the desert rain frog has to figure  out how to get water in other ways.

But these frogs don’t live  just anywhere in the desert. They opt for deserts near the  shores of the Atlantic Ocean. They’re also most active at night, when there’s more likely to be  marine fog rolling off the sea.

That fog keeps the frogs and the sand  damp, at least for a little while. Then during the day, the frogs  burrow into the fog-dampened sand, which retains moisture and keeps  their skin from drying out. No pond necessary!

Next, Nearly 9,000 feet above sea level, on mountain tops so forbidding that researchers have a hard  time even reaching them, the saddleback toad is on cloud nine. Saddleback toads are a group of tiny frogs, typically less than 1.5 cm from nose to butt. Now these toads don’t actually float  around in the clouds or anything though that would be pretty cool.

They live in leaf litter on the forest floor. It’s the forests themselves  that are in the clouds. Appropriately, these are called cloud forests, which are lush environments that  grow at such high elevations that their canopies regularly touch the clouds.

Saddleback toads are so optimized  to live in these cloud forest s that they are basically the  only places they can live. They’re adapted to the exact  set of conditions found there. Specifically, they need a cold, humid environment.

And because you’ll mostly only  find that on mountaintops, saddleback toads exist only in  small, isolated populations. They can’t really reach their  neighboring toad groups since   that would require leaving their comfort zones. This makes these toads especially vulnerable, since they basically live on mountaintop islands.

In fact, many of the species of  saddleback toads seem to be restricted to just one or two mountaintops,  meaning they are microendemic. Species that are microendemic are often more vulnerable to  changes in their environments, which means saddleback toads  have a lot to worry about. That said, these places are  extremely remote and hard to access, what with being at high-elevation mountaintops.

They’re so remote that scientists struggle  to even get there to study the wildlife, so there’s a lot we have to  learn about saddleback toads. . Now, all the frogs we’ve talked about need  to spend at least some time in the water. But none of them are full-time water dwellers.

And as it turns out, evolving to live in  water all the time requires some adaptations that bear an awkward resemblance to  a certain feature of human anatomy. The tongue? Is it the tongue?

Is it ears? The scrotum frog lives in Lake Titicaca, a high altitude lake in the Andes mountains, as well as a few neighboring lakes. But it turns out there’s an evolutionary  reason for this scrotum frog to look … like it looks.

Specifically, these frogs are well  suited to their underwater lifestyle, all thanks to their somewhat awkward appearance. We talked about how frogs absorb oxygen  through their skin while underwater. The more surface area of skin a frog has, the better they can absorb that tasty oxygen, which is why the scrotum frog’s loose, flappy skin  is such a useful, if not great looking, trait.

The skin flaps are an adaptation  to the lower oxygen environment where these frogs live. The scrotum frog is huge, and its large size gives it more  surface area to absorb oxygen, too. It also has the slowest  metabolism of any known frog, which means it doesn’t need  as much oxygen to begin with.

All this helps them survive in the hypoxic, Or oxygen low waters they are found in And when it needs a little extra oxygen, it does a dance-like bobbing thing,  which helps get more of it into the skin. Scrotum frogs are so good at  surviving in these low-oxygen waters that they’re fully aquatic. They don’t ever come to the surface,  because there’s no reason to.

Which is probably a good thing, I  don’t know that I would want to see one Most of these frogs share their environments  with at least some other creatures, albeit ones that make a little  more sense to be found there. But our final frog has managed to  survive in an environment so barren that it’s been deemed a “wasteland.” The thumbnail-sized laterite frog is  found along the West Coast of India. The region is usually rocky and devoid of life.

But during the monsoon season,  pools will form on the surface. And some things manage to live in and  around the pools, including plants… and amazingly, these frogs. So where do these frogs go  when their pools dry up?

Well, your guess is probably  about as good as anyone else’s! Scientists only began researching  the laterite frogs in 2016, and haven’t made much progress. Given how little we know about them, you’d think that we’d all be making  sure to protect their home turf and study this entire ecosystem  hiding within a wasteland.

But unfortunately the habitat isn’t protected,  and local people use the area to dump trash, wash their cars, and just generally  create hard-to-clean up messes. It’s also full of a mineral called  laterite that can be used to make bricks, so there’s lots of mining  activity in the area too. Because the frogs live in small,  seasonal pools surrounded by barren rock, their habitat is already pretty fragmented.

And the lack of protection  makes them even more vulnerable. Still, their existence — and the fact that they’ve only been  known to science for a few years — challenges the notion that anywhere can  truly be described as a “wasteland.” With the right acquired traits, even a place like this can be  a comfortable home for someone. From frozen ponds in Ontario  to a trash dump in India, frogs can live in a lot of unlikely places, and they owe their resilience to  millions of years of adaptation.

It just goes to show that there’s almost  no problem that evolution can’t solve. Even if it does have to make something  look like a scrotum to do it. Thanks for watching this SciShow video and thanks to Brilliant for supporting it!

Brilliant is an online learning  platform with courses in science, computer science, and math. So to learn more about how their looks  help frogs adapt to different environments, you can take the Brilliant  course: Geometry Fundamentals. This interactive course covers  surface area to give you a better idea of what skin flaps could do for oxygen absorption.

And while the frogs we covered in this video might not be the examples provided in the course, Brilliant weaves in many other  examples throughout the 25 lessons so you don’t have to learn in the abstract. You can check it out by clicking the  link in the description down below or going to Brilliant.org/SciShow for 20% off an annual premium  Brilliant subscription. [ OUTRO ]