Abstract
WHEN living at Mackay, Queensland, I frequently observed that the common house-frogs (H. cœrulea) were injured in the hind-limbs, and on several occasions I would hear them croaking in pain; but on arrival all I saw would be a wretched exhausted frog weakly hopping away with a wound in the hind-leg, from which the blood would be oozing. Later on I found that rats attack the frogs. The rats catch the frog by the hind-leg, and apparently suck the wound they cause, then let the frog crawl away, attack it and suck it again, and so on until the rat has had enough. I believe the rats suck the blood, because I was never able to discover a frog so attacked on which the flesh had been destroyed.
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ROTH, H. The Enemies of the Frog. Nature 34, 194 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/034194a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/034194a0
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