Originally posted by Ren
I have seen a video of the thing. It’s not an edit. The three frogs are siamese <strike>twins</strike>triplets.
Learn your numerical terms! F FOR THE TERM.
My parents have seen a video of it too, and I doubt it’s a big collaborational hoax by every news station on the planet.
I really don’t doubt its possible. This reminds me of transplant experiments scientists have done with frog and chick embryos/blastulas/gastrulas to test cell determination. Essentially in those cases, they found if a certain segment from 1 part that is destined to form 1 thing was added to the opposite side of an embryo’s same normal part, you got something similar to a mirrored siamese frog. So I think there was probably a glitch somewhere in this frog’s development where that segment of cells in the blastula/gastrula probably messed up somehow and gave rise to multiple organizer segments instead of just 1 and thus the frog grew a part for each organizer it had available.
Its really neat it survived as a triplet and that this happened in nature.
reads Sin’s post
smiles and nods
(Can we get a Reader’s Digest condensed version in Laymen’s Terms? >>)
Developing organisms go through different stages depending on the number of cells they have and their functions and these are common to all animal multicellular life and it is a very complicated process.
So this ball of cells called a blastula eventually undergoes this invagination process called gastrulation to become a gastrula and this forms the digestive tract at a site called the dorsal blastopore lip. Near this lip is a thing called the “organizer”. For a lot of reasons, what ends up happening around an organizer is this: specific tissues will be stimulated to develop in a specific order. In developing organisms, regions are specified to become specific tissues because of stuff like the organizer.
To summarize an experiment where you got siamese frogs essentially (dunno if they survived), they cut out an organizer from 1 developing frog and grafted it on the opposite side of another frog’s blastula, giving it 2 organizers. This led to a ‘siamese’ frog, essentially, because the organizers don’t influence each other. They independently led to the formation of the frog parts that should be surrounding them.
I’m not saying that for sure, this triplet frog had a problem with its organizer, but it is a possibility that it did or that something analogous to this happened.
In lay terms: there are factors that stabilish where organs will grow in fetuses (I don’t know if that’s the right word). Usually these factors work well, but sometimes they screw up, leading to anomallies. In this particular case, the cells of the frog were programmed to generate a body… Three times.
Sin: the morula had three gray crescents. The egg was most probably formed already with three crescents in about the same position as the bodies are. I think the three ‘bodies’ don’t share internal organs.
Edit: didn’t see your last post. Organogenesis in amphibians is dictated by the gray crescent, which exists already in the unfertilized egg. The way it interacts with the cells is quite interesting. If you slice an embryo in two, for instance, you don’t get two fully developed identical twins as you would have with mammals, but rather you get two halves of frog to be born disconnected from each other. I’ve seen this done experimentally, really a freakish thing to see.
Haw! They only talked about splicing mammal embryos in my class. I didn’t notice that 'til now. Interesting. I’m going to look it up next week. Nonetheless, the frogs had a problem with one of the key organizing regions involved in development, just not the one I had in mind. Too bad they didn’t get to dissect the frog. If they don’t share internal organs, it’d make sense why this specimen is alive and the one I saw didn’t make it.
If you are going into researching about it, a few keywords are:
-Mosaic embryos
-Regulative embryos
In brief, if you did that experiment where you place cells from an embryo into a gastrula -> if you use mosaic animals you will get siamese twins, if you use regulative animals the transplanted cells will differentiate into the same kind of cell of the region where they were implanted. From what I’ve learned, only olygovitelic (olygovitelinic, or something like that - I don’t know the exact wording in English) are of the mosaic kind.
-Roux and Driesch
These scientists were very important to experimental embryology.
-Xenopus
A genus of amphibians that is used in these experiments.
-Gray Crescent
A structure that separates the animal from the vegetal pole of the embryo, and also dictates the organogenesis. Before the formation of the poles, it occupies the “lower” half of the egg.
Edit: I took a quick reading at my notebook. The Crescent is not fully dominant on the organogenesis, as the Spemann Organizer is present and functional in the gastrula.
AHH! Too much Bilogical mumbo-jumbo, for my tastes.
Still, whether fake or not, that is one really freaky frog.
NAKED LESBIAN FROG TRIPLETS!
I can’t believe nobody had said anything like that yet.
Originally posted by Cala
I wasn’t aware that the BBC did prank stories.
Spaghetti Tree Harvest hoax. 
And Macc:
WHOOOOOOOA ARRRRRRHG NOOOOOOOO!!!1!eleven O_o
I want a larger picture! Not a huge one, but a slightly enlarged one would be interesting.