Glassfrogs can render themselves nearly invisible while they sleep with a unique trick; they pack nearly 90% of their red blood into one of their organs.
When a glassfrog falls asleep, it vanishes. Nestled atop a lush leaf, the frog's bright green back blends right in, while its underbelly's reddish hue quickly grows transparent.
"If you really want to be transparent, you need to hide your red blood cells," study co-author Sönke Johnsen , a professor of biology at Duke University in North Carolina, told Live Science."These glassfrogs are — by some process; we don't know the details — filtering red blood cells out of their blood and cramming them into their livers so tightly that it should create a clot. But it doesn't.
Northern glassfrogs seldom grow larger than 1 inch in length, and spend most of their adulthood perched on leaves in Central and South American forest canopies, high above the rapidly flowing streams where they lay their eggs. Their underbellies are translucent even when the frogs are awake, allowing an observer to easily see their hearts pumping red blood throughout their bodies.
Once they had developed this technique, studying how glassfrogs turn transparent was a simple matter of repeatedly agitating the hapless amphibians."We'd let the frog rest, then poke it a few times, and let it fall asleep again." Johnsen said. Following the hemoglobin revealed that glassfrogs pull 89% of their red blood cells from circulation and stash them in their livers.
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