Robot tadpoles and spoofing frog communication

Another cool scientist profile dropped on Nature earlier, and I wanted to share it here. Billie Goolsby uses robots built by Tony Chen to eavesdrop on the conversations between Frogs and Tadpoles. How cool is that! Essentially, it turns out that one of the key components of parent-offspring in these frogs is how they "wriggle". They use this wriggling to communicate hunger to the parents to supply food. (An unfertilized egg, nature is crazy) So the they designed a robot to mimic the tadpole, and trick the parents into thinking it is a real one, so they can investigate how this communication actually works. LINK: Nature — How I eavesdrop on frog conversations LINK: arXiv — Feed Me: Robotic Infiltration of Poison Frog Families (2305.14570) Here are some photos of the contraption Image credit: Tony G. Chen et al., “Feed Me: Robotic Infiltration of Poison Frog Families”, arXiv:2305.14570 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)