Frogs’ Sticky Tongues Lift Giant Prey

Horned frogs do eat insects but also lizards, snakes, rodents, other frogs, and small birds. With a less sticky apparatus, those animals would be too heavy or could easily escape before being pulled into a frog’s jaws. Inspiring their amphibian subjects to shoot out their tongues at glass slides (behind which a tasty cricket was visible), Thomas Kleinteich and Stanislav Gorb, who research functional morphology and biomechanics at Kiel University in Germany, measured the sticking power and contact areas of the tongues of South American horned frogs (genus Ceratophrys).
 And what they learned surprised them.