NATURE DESK

IN A WORLD FIRST, a woman who lived with pond life for twenty five years has laid tadpole eggs.

The woman, who lives in the Orinoco rain forest, was apparently abandoned by her parents soon after birth.

“Okay, actually the family were from New York and on a bucket list trip when they were attacked by who knows,” according to a local police chief who refused to be named. “The parents jumped into the river, forgetting about their newborn. It appears the bad guys then dumped the baby into a pond. No one knows what happened to the parents but they didn’t come out of the river. The baby was raised by frogs. Simple. Nothing to see here!”

“Actually, there’s quite a lot to see,” says Professor Darius Wynn who insists he discovered the women during a trip to the upper reaches of the great South American river. “The child spent decades living in the pond, interacting with countless frog colonies, eating insects, snails, slugs and worms; and in the process, she developed, among other things, a green hue to her skin as well as the ability to breathe through it under water. Amazing!”

The police chief is less impressed. “This is the rain forest. I can show you monsters, snakes with five heads, tribes of people only two centimeters tall, lost kingdoms; gold cities. So, a frog child …”

“We believe that she actually developed gills in the first year of her life in the pond but, as with frogs, these deteriorated in favor of her lungs,” says Professor Wynn. “It’s the evolution of breathing skin that is truly fantastic. Toxic though it is. Because it is lethal to the touch. And she has very large eyes and remarkably elastic cheeks; not to mention the webbed feet and hands. And wait for this, she communicates in ribbits. Frog speech. We are hoping to be able to translate it when we teach her enough human language. So far she can speak some Spanish and Portuguese. But no English.

“The tadpoles she has given birth to are being examined closely for human DNA. We’re already studying the changes in her own DNA: we need to know how much social circumstance can spark DNA variation. It’s so exciting. But we have to tread carefully. Remember, her skin is highly toxic. Local Indians use her to tip their hunting arrows. And she can’t just pull a fly from mid-air using her tongue, she can spit poison at you from two hundred meters if she gets angry. You’re dead in about three seconds. And then there’s the leaping. Oh, you have to see the leaping to believe it. She can hop fifty times her own body length in a single leap. I mean this is a super women. An evolutionary marvel.”