The Book of Animal Ignorance by Ted Dewan

their many trips to and from the larder.
    Most of the nuisance caused by foxes is far outweighed by their indispensable role as rodent-killers. Even the deeply annoying habit of digging up lawns and sports fields is not entirely their fault, as they mistake the smell of blood-and-bone fertiliser on the grass for dead meat, and try to uncover a non-existent corpse. On the other hand, don’t encourage them to nest under your house. At night, the noise of the cubs screaming as they fight and play is indescribable, almost as bad as the smell of carrion, urine and faeces (the latter will be cheerfully deposited as a ‘mark’ on any shoes or children’s toys you leave outside). They also enjoy chewing through electricity and phone wires, and gas and water pipes.
    MOUSE DIVING
    Urban foxes can easily become tame, even allowing themselves to be fed from the hand and stroked like a pet. This latent tameness was selectively bred in a famous Russian experiment of the 1950s. Within twenty years, the foxes had lost all fear of humans, wagged their tails, developed floppy ears and black and white fur: they had become, in effect, ‘dogs’.

Frog
    Toxic paradox
    I n fairy-tales, frogs are ugly but kind; in real life, they are breathtakingly lovely and deadly dangerous. Such is true, at least, of the brilliantly coloured tree frogs of South America. Their neon reds, shocking oranges, acid greens, purples and blues cover the entire visible spectrum and their eyes are like precious stones.
    The world’s deadliest frog is the Golden poison dart frog, Phyllobates terribilis . Sometimes mint-green, sometimes Kodak yellow, it is no larger than a bottle-top but contains enough toxins to kill 20,000 mice or ten men. An amount of its poison weighing less than three grains of salt is sufficient to kill a person and even just to hold one in your hand can be lethal. Poison dart frogs are so called because tribesmen use their venom to tip the missiles of their blowpipes. Captain James Cochrane first discovered this in 1823. He also found out how they extracted the poison: skewering the frog so painfully that it sweated it out. The second most poisonous frog in the world is the Black-legged dart frog ( Phyllobates bicolor ) of Colombia. It is bright orange or yellow with navy-blue legs. The locals make this one sweat by heating it over a flame.
    To vomit, some frog species cough up their whole stomach and then carefully rinse it out with their right hand before pushing it back inside .
    FROGGY GOES A-COURTIN’
    As a general rule, the more beautiful the frog, the more dangerous it is. This is called aposematism, from the Greek for ‘warning sign’. The tiny, red-and-white-striped Ecuadorean tree frog, Epipedobates tricolor , seems to be wearing a Sunderland FC strip or impersonating a barber’s pole. Comical? Certainly not: it will kill you. Other species aren’t dangerous but have evolved to look as if they are. The Red-eyed tree frog of Costa Rica is green with blue-and-yellow striped sides, orange toes and liquid scarleteyes. It has a call that sounds like a baby rattlesnake but it is completely harmless. This is called Batesian mimicry after Henry Walter Bates (1825–92) who spent seven years in the Amazon with Alfred Russell Wallace and found 8,000 creatures new to science.

    Trinidad’s Paradoxical frog ( Pseudis paradoxa ) is so called because its tadpoles are three times larger than the adult, but frogs and paradoxes go hand in hand. There are over 5,000 known species and new ones turn up all the time – a hundred in Sri Lanka in 2002 alone. But they’re also dying out at an alarming rate: a third of all frogs are at risk, because frogs breathe through their skin. Though their toxins can occasionally be dangerous to us, the poisons that humans leave lying around are far deadlier to them. This may be a tragedy for both of us. Frog toxins are alkaloids – like cocaine, nicotine,