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An Alaska wood frog creates a hibernacula from duff and leaf litter in
a
spruce forest on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus in preparation
for
the long winter freeze. Photo Credit: Photographer: Uwe Anders
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Freezing and thawing might not be good for the average steak, but it
seems to help wood frogs each fall as they prepare to survive Alaska's winter
cold.
"Alaska wood frogs spend more time freezing and thawing outside
than a steak does in your freezer and the frog comes back to life in the spring
in better shape than the steak," said Don Larson, University of Alaska
Fairbanks graduate student and lead author on a recent paper demonstrating that
freeze tolerance in Alaska wood frogs is more extreme than previously thought.
Although wood frogs are well-studied freeze-tolerant amphibians,
Larson's research is believed to be the first to examine the frogs under natural
conditions.
In subarctic Interior Alaska, wood frogs overwinter in the ground
covered by duff and leaf litter, creating a hibernacula, where temperatures can
remain below freezing for more than six months with minimum temperatures of
minus four (-20⁰ Celsius).
Tracking wood frogs to their natural hibernacula, and using a fenced
hibernacula in the Biological Reserve north of the UAF campus, Larson and
co-author Brian Barnes, director of the UAF Institute of Arctic Biology and an
expert in cold-climate physiology, wanted to know how cold and how long
Alaska's wood frogs could survive in their natural habitat.
"Imagine what happens when you suck on a freeze pop," said
Larson. "After you've sucked out all the sweet stuff, you're left with
just ice. That's what happens to cells when they freeze. As ice formation pulls
the water out of cells, the cells desiccate or dry out and eventually
die."
Frogs prevent this freeze-pop effect by packing their cells with
glucose (a kind of sugar) that reduces drying and stabilizes cells, a process
scientists call cryoprotection.
"Concentrating sugar inside the cell helps balance the
concentration of salts outside the cell that occurs as ice forms," said
Barnes. "Less water leaves the cell than if sugar was not present and
sugar and other cryoprotectants are thought to "hold" water inside
the cell."
The curious thing Larson discovered is that when wood frogs are outside
in their natural environment they accumulate much higher concentrations of
glucose in their tissues than do frogs frozen in the lab.
Glucose concentrations in the outside frogs were 13-fold higher in
muscle tissue, 10-fold higher in heart tissue and 3.3-fold higher in liver
tissue compared to lab-frozen frogs, as described in their paper published in
the Journal of Experimental Biology.
This extra protection enabled frogs to survive colder temperatures for
a longer time than scientists previously thought, but Larson and Barnes
wondered how they accumulated so much glucose?
Larson thinks the process that creates freezer burn on a frozen steak
gives frogs the ability to survive being frozen at minimum temperatures below
zero (-18⁰ Celsius) for up to 218 days with 100 percent survival.
Frogs collected from sites in the Eastern U.S. and Canada have previously
been shown to only survive being frozen for a few weeks and to no lower than
about -19⁰ (-7.2⁰ Celsius).
"In the field in early Autumn it's freezing during the night,
thawing slightly during the day, and these repeated freezing episodes stimulate
the frogs to release more and more glucose," Larson said. "It's not
warm enough for long enough for the frog to reclaim much of that glucose and
over time it accumulates giving the frog more protection against cell
damage."
Lab-frozen frogs are held at a constant temperature and without the
freeze-thaw cycles Larson observed in the wild and so the frogs made glucose
only when they initially froze and that was that.
"Whether the extremes in freezing tolerance in Alaska frogs as
compared to more southern populations are due to patterns of temperature change
during freezing or are due to genetic differences, and thereby represent
evolutionary change, awaits further study," said Barnes.
The feats of freezing frogs are more than just a curiosity and may one
day have application in the science of human organ transplantation.
"If science can figure out how to freeze human organs without
damage it would allow more time to reach people in need of organs," said
Larson.
Citation
D. J. Larson, L. Middle, H. Vu, W. Zhang, A. S. Serianni, J. Duman, B.
M. Barnes.Wood frog adaptations to overwintering in Alaska: new limits to freezing
tolerance.
Journal of Experimental Biology, 2014; 217 (12): 2193 DOI:
10.1242/jeb.101931