By: Alex Chu

Lots of frogs cannot land properly when leaping. After leaping from a pumpkin toadlet, they usually do a cartwheel or a backflip and land in a bellyflop position, plummet, or crash. A pumpkin toadlet is usually found in southern Brazil.

“I’ve looked at a lot of frogs and these are the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” says Richard Essner, Jr. He’s a zoologist. He works with vertebrates — animals with backbones — at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Essner and his team have found the reason why frogs can’t land correctly. It’s because frogs lack internal equipment to sense changes when they rotate and land. The team told Science Advances on June 15 about this. These creatures have trouble landing feet first and some think that it has something to do with the structures in the inner ear of a frog.

Essner and his team analyzed videos of these frogs and were surprised by their maneuvers. They traveled to southern Brazil to learn more about this species. Pumpkin toadlets are also known as Brachycephalus are very tiny. At first, the investigative team struggled to find the frogs; they had to listen for loud noises to identify them.

When analyzing footage of the frog’s movement, they realized toadlets have an issue tracking their bodies’ motion. Typically, fluid sloshing through bony tubes in the inner ear helps animals sense their body’s position. The pumpkin toadlet’s tubes are the smallest ever recorded for an adult vertebrate. Other studies had shown that the tiny tubes don’t work all that well.

“These tiny frogs are really bad at landing jumps,”, Essner says. T” their bony back plates might make them crash.