underthehedge:

savedgame:

Next viral tumblr blorbo: giant old as fuck tadpole

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#WHY is she not a frog yet#what went wrong

So like, the metamorphosis process in amphibians is a whole complex thing but its initiation and progress is pretty straightforwardly reliant on two hormones, thyroxin and prolactin; the first pushing metamorphosis and the second opposing it. As the relative levels change through the tadpole stage, different tissues are affected, hence why tadpoles develop limbs etc. in a specific order.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that if a tadpole has a thyroid hormone deficiency (can be genetic, environmental or a result of physical injury), its body never gets the signal to do things like “grow legs” or “turn into a whole frog”. One of the scientists who studied it noted that it’s developmental level is basically as if it’d hatched very recently, except that it’s huge, so basically it got just past the external gills phase and then just…stopped changing (except in size).

Sadly, Goliath died in 2019 but was still growing at the time of its death. As far as I know they don’t know why it died, but it’s possible that it was just a matter of it being Too Big for its physiology, that never having been made to support a tadpole that size.