I heard a bullfrog calling. It seemed kind of late in the year for bullfrog breeding but he was calling away. Male bullfrogs sit around a water source and call hoping a female will be attracted to the call. Recent studies show that the bullfrogs are acting somewhat like prairie chickens. Male prairie chickens will congregate at a spot called a lek. The males will dance around and the females will sit in the grass and check them out. The female will then enter the lek and go up to the male she has selected and the two of them will leave together. Later the male returns and starts to dance again. Somehow the dancing lets the females know which male is the most “fit” and he gets chosen a lot!

Same thing with bullfrog calls. The call tells the females which male is most fit and like the prairie chickens, a vast majority picks the same male. The female will go to the male. He will wrap his front legs around her and start to squeeze. This may take a while and if he isn’t “fit” he will tire and let go. If he is fit, she will release a bunch of eggs, as many as 20,000, and he will then fertilize them directly. She will leave and he will start singing again.

That’s a lot of eggs and if they all hatched, we would have a biblical plague of frogs each and every year. Since they are fertilized directly, most of the eggs will be shadowed by other eggs and not get fertilized. One estimate is that only one in 50 actually gets fertilized, but that is still 400 fertile eggs! Of the 400 that do get fertilized and hatch into tadpoles, only about eight will live to undergo metamorphosis and turn into a frog. That takes almost two years, and many will get eaten! Following metamorphosis, the frog can live to about eight years in the wild, longer in captivity.

Rosie the Ribeter is a bullfrog from California that holds the world record for frog jumping at the Calaveras County Frog Jumping Championship, the Olympics of frog jumping. Her three jumps in 1986 took her 21 feet, 5 and ¾ inches! But, as goofy as it sounds, Rosie was a trained frog-jumping frog. A “normal”, untrained Nebraska bullfrog will jump 4 – 5 feet at a time, or about 15 feet in three jumps. Bullfrogs are the frogs used now but it was probably a California redlegged frog that Mark Twain wrote about in 1865* because bullfrogs hadn’t been introduced into California at that time, and red-legged frogs are an endangered species so they can’t be used today.

Bullfrogs are not native to Nebraska and were probably released into the state as a source of food. The USGS lists the first “official” report of bullfrogs in Nebraska as 1942; however, they were here well before that. Bullfrogs are our biggest frogs, and they eat almost everything. I remember as a young kid Doris Gates, the woman most responsible for me becoming a naturalist, took me birdwatching with her college biology class to Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge north of Merriman. There was a huge bullfrog there and the ranger told us that they were a problem on the Refuge because they regularly ate the baby ducks! I think that was one of the things that made me want to study reptiles and amphibians.

Bullfrogs may not be native to this area, but they are here and the other night one amorous male, I’ll call him Jeremiah, was singing away. I wonder if he had any wine?**