Frogs Playing Dead

Today my family and my cousins' family travelled to the same state park we have been travelling to for the last three years, pretending all the way that the scenery we encountered was more interesting than the last time we had visited, a month ago. Little was different, even the two tiny ponies who shared a small patch of grass at the turn-in looked the same.

The river contained in this state park, though, was for the second time in these three years that we have travelled there dried up, and this time we happened to have brought my trust metal detector along with us, hoping to find something along the lines of gold or Ned Kelly's wristwatch. After travelling kilometres through the dried riverbed, we lost interest in the lack of beeping of the metal detector and spend the rest of the trip looking down at the rocks as we stepped past them, in hopes of finding a gleaming golden nugget looking back up at us, awaiting our touch and our awe-struck faces.

We were not lucky enough to live through that moment. In fact, we were not even lucky enough to find a mere crystal, nor a gem stone. Nothing special was found. All that we saw was the repeated amounts of dusty pebbles, scattered around the floor like a child's Legos. Nearing the end of our journey due to the fact that we almost were cooked from the scorching Australian sun, I noticed tiny beings hopping beneath me. Not grasshoppers, nor strange looking centipedes with wings, nor wasps, rather little frogs. 

Jacques, one of my cousin's immediate reactions was that these frogs were poisonous. We spent fifteen minutes running away from the little swamp and I continuously checked my shoes just in case one of these things had hopped into them. I did not want to lose my leg, after all, these minuscule frogs were 'poisonous'. 

After reaching a point far from these jumping poisonous frogs, I came to the realisation that they were not poisonous at all. "Wait," I said, "we should catch them!" Fabulous idea indeed, but we were lacking a container. Jacques' brother, Jean, carried a water bottle. "No," he quickly said, defending his need to conquer his thirst. Behind him sat an alternative, an empty abandoned Coca Cola bottle. So his sister, Layal, picked up the bottle, and returned to us beaming a smile of destruction - destruction to this wondrous habitat. But we were not planning on leaving empty-handed, so we figured that instead of paying one-hundred and fifty dollars in the pet store, why not catch our own here?

And so began the entrapment and capture process of these little frogs. We were more productive doing so than finding precious stones, mainly because we knew that the chances of catching a frog exceeded by millions the chances of finding a nugget. We were right. We caught four, and filled up the bottle with a little bit of swamp water, and headed back to the picnic table where our parents waited.

I noticed one thing about the frogs, though - halfway through our trip back to the picnic table, Layal exclaimed, "they're dead! The frogs are dead!" I explained to her that it was a defence mechanism because of her shaking the bottle so much that they probably thought they were caught in a tsunami of some sort. "No, they're dead!" she insisted. So I held the bottle, and after a moment of calm, they began to move again.

These little frogs play dead. They play dead better than trained dogs, and for moments they had us all fooled. These tiny creatures have the ability to fool beings like us. It is rather fascinating.