Cutaneous respiration from The Digital Frog 2.5Being dubbed the “frog lady” by all and sundry results in friends and family alerting me to all things froggy.

So I regularly receive emails about froggy topics such as the 70-million-year-old fossil of a giant frog unearthed in Madagascar, the killer disease chytridiomycosis (a fungal disease that has been blamed for the extinction of one-third of the 120 frog species lost since 1980) and even an article about an Iranian woman giving birth to a frog (and the date was not April 1!).

Yesterday, I received several emails about the recent discovery of a lungless frog in Indonesia. One thing that bothered me about some of the articles was the implication that it is unusual for frogs to breathe through the skin as it’s know that frogs breathe in three different ways: though their mouths, lungs and skin. So I consulted the respiratory system module in the Anatomy and Physiology section of The Digital Frog 2.5. This is a small part of what it has to say:

Frogs have three different methods of respiration, or gas exchange:

  • cutaneous respiration takes place across the skin,
  • buccopharyngeal respiration occurs in the mouth,
  • pulmonary respiration uses the nares, mouth, and lung

On land, most oxygen absorption occurs in the lungs. In water, most gas exchange takes place across the skin, but even the most aquatic frogs must come up to the surface to breathe. Most carbon dioxide is released across the skin. While hibernating, frogs do not use their lungs and depend on cutaneous respiration.

It seems frogs are much more versatile than us humans. But then, of course, we are not amphibians.

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