Usually when a dog eats a frog, the frog is digested in the dogs stomach acid and absorbed like any other food would be.
However, there are exceptions - if a dog eats a a red tree frog it has be known for the frog to lodge permanently in the dogs oesophagus. This is relatively painless for the dog and the frog can live for many years simply surviving on scraps of food that pass it on the way to the dogs stomach.
In South America, many wild dogs develop a strange bark due to the amphibian lodged in their digestive tract. For many years tribes people believed that these dogs had been possessed by an evil spirit and widespread fear of these croaking dogs was commonplace.
Occasionally a frog will grow sufficiently large as to restrict a dogs airway, this tragic occurrence usually results in a depleted oxygen supply to the dogs brain causing peculiar behaviour such as heavy drooling, apparent disorientation and the marked desire to lick electrical outlets.
Fascinating post. I might add that in 1981, Professor Stavros Duran published a paper in "Nature" magazine proposing the evolutionary benefit of the red tree frog / wild dog relationship. He suggested that it was a symbiotic one, and was entirely intentional.
ReplyDeleteThe nub of his theory was that the dogs deliberately ingested the tree frogs as a display of strength, and the frogs allowed this to happen in return for gaining protection from predators.
Red tree frogs are mildly poisonous, and their successful consumption sends a powerful signal as to the strength of the dog. This signal is compounded by the loudness of the ensuing croaks, which gives some indication of frog size and therefore poison quantity. In short, females are attracted to dogs with louder croaks, with this reasoning: "That dog must have eaten a very large, and therefore very poisonous, frog. And yet he still goes about his daily business with ease, so he must be a very strong dog. I would like to have sex with him."
Tests have indeed shown that when South American wild dog bitches are played a series of increasingly loud frog croaks, they become increasingly sexually aroused.