Frogs swallow Asian giant hornets - even after injections into their eyes and mouths

Frogs lead a seemingly peaceful life in forest ecosystems: living in water bodies and damp undergrowth, like hobbits among moss and leaves.

However, studies of their stomach contents have long shown that they occasionally eat worker wasps and hornets - at which point their "idyllic" image no longer seems so appealing, especially from the perspective of a mammal familiar with the pain of stings.

A team of scientists in Japan decided to find out: how do frogs react to wasp and hornet venom? Do they suffer stings and try to avoid them, or are they able to tolerate such attacks?

To do this, the researchers set up a simple but very illustrative experiment: they gave some frogs the opportunity - at will - to eat a hornet.

They used three species of hornets of different sizes, including the fearsome Asian giant hornet. Each insect species was matched with comparable sized frogs. Observations showed that adult frogs actively attacked workers of all three species. Moreover, most of the amphibians still swallowed the hornets, even after receiving several stings, including in the mouth and eye area.

It is known that the severity of pain from a sting and its lethality are not always directly related: some potentially lethal "stings" are almost painless, and particularly painful ones may not be lethal. In this case, the frogs demonstrated, as the authors put it, an "exceptionally high level of resistance" to the potent venom of stinging insects.

The results of the experiment show that for these amphibians even the powerful venom of hornets does not become a sufficient deterrent - for the sake of caloric prey they are ready to tolerate injections and, apparently, successfully survive the effects of the toxin.