A FEW SHADES OF GRAY

Yes, the title of today’s tidbit is misleading and plays with the titillating marketing of the successful “50 Shades of Gray” book series.  I will admit to playing with your emotions and then dashing them to bits.  We are not talking about anything sexy.  We are talking about treefrogs.  The gray treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis or versicolor) can be green, gray, light brown or dark brown.  Helpful huh?  The reason I added two species names is that there are two different species that are so similar that you might as well just lump them.  Part of this “lumping” is because of the color variation.  So, what is an intrepid frog explorer to do?  Well, as it turns out we have a few characteristics that are “no brainers” in our treefrog identification.  First, there are only a few types of treefrogs in these here parts.  A treefrog is a frog that lives in trees (Duh!) and they can pull this off because they have suction cups on their toes!  These suction cup toes are sticky thanks to a layer of mucous produced by the suction cup cells.  I know how these toes work first hand.  As a small child, my brother would lick the suction cup of a “suction cup bow and arrow set” and then stick it to my forehead.  Licking the suction cup made it stick much stronger and longer.  Clearly my brother and treefrogs had it figured out.  Okay, so know that you know about treefrogs, let’s return to the issue of identifying gray treefrogs given their color variation.  We can identify gray treefrogs easily because the only other kind of treefrog in these parts is a green one.  Yep, the green treefrog (Hyla cinereal) is always green and it always has a white racing stripe on its side.  All others are “gray”.  Which strikes me as ironic (the identification of gray treefrogs is not black or white, but gray).