Biological Miracle – Wood Frog

Now I'm wondering all kinds of things about their brain. Are they capable of forming memories, and would they retain those memories after a freeze/thaw cycle?

Effectively they're dead when they freeze. I'm assuming there's no brain activity.. Which means when they thaw they're being restored to life. I wonder if any other animals experience this

Reading about them, it seems they migrate in winter (like half a mile uphill), but the adults always return to the same breeding pond in spring, so that information is stored somewhere.

Hibernate and resume.

I would assume that just as a computer’s storage remains intact after a restart, these frogs’ brains have internal structure, synaptic connections etc that are preserved after a freeze/thaw cycle.

I'm not surprised. There have been studies that show caterpillars retain memories through metamorphosis into a butterfly (a process that basically liquefies them).

That’s a bad assumption though. Based on our inability to bring brains back to life it seems very likely the better comparison is volatile memory like RAM.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, butterflies retain some memories formed as caterpillars after every cell in their body changes drastically. They never die but they change immensely and still retain memories, so I'm not sure we know enough to say what good and bad assumptions are here.

Also this should be relatively trivial to test.

The nervous system of caterpillars is not disolved during the transformation.

Couldn't it just be algorithmic? Go uphill in the summer, then downhill until you hit water, you'll probably end in the same pond?

The hit rate is 100%, apparently.